Robin Honderich has been with the Toronto Star for more than 10 years, working in various newsroom content strategy and data roles. He’s now taking over as the head of audience development, where he’s the conduit between the newsrooms, product, and consumer marketing to develop growth strategies. 

We recently spoke, and I wanted to share some excerpts from that conversation. 

Q: What’s the goal of your new role? Is it something you pitched yourself? 

A: Yes, I’ve been pitching this for some time. Too often we’re in our silos and don’t work effectively as a result. Take SEO. The newsroom may be doing SEO best practices, but it will be useless if your tech stack isn’t good. And your tech stack can be good, but it won’t matter if the newsroom isn’t paying attention to SEO. It felt fragmented, and the goal of this is to bring it all together.

Q: What are the metrics your newsroom is looking at? Are all the journalists bought into metrics? 

A: Everyone has access to Parse.ly, and we look at subscription segments, pageviews, conversions, last post touched before conversion, time spent, that sort of thing. It took a while to get the culture to where it is now, and there is still work to do, but it’s something we’ve been at for a long time now.

I’ve had a lot of support from senior management over time, and we’ve put in a lot of time and effort to show that we’re there to help and are not using the numbers to punish or tell editors or reporters they don’t know what they’re doing.

We’re always looking for actionable takeaways. And our best journalism is often confirmed by the numbers — our data regularly backs up good editorial instincts. 

Q: What will you be focusing on next? Where do you hope to take this role?

A: We have a steering committee and met last week. We all agreed we have too many sources of truth and need to get back to one. Before, people could take the same data, go to their corners, and come back with their own versions of what it means. It’s not the sexiest work, but it’s important. 

As a result of Canada’s Online News Act, which requires tech giants to pay publishers for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online, Torstar’s smaller publications saw a significant drop in social referrals, Honderich said. 

In some cases, they had up to 20% of their traffic from Facebook, while the Star was closer to 4%. Like other publishers, the Star is concerned about AI’s potential to further decrease referrals, as well. Honderich’s team is now focused on strategies for building more direct traffic from readers. 

Among their tactics and ideas:

• Doubling down on newsletters to build habit.

• Using push alerts to re-engage low-usage users.

• Commenting, which requires registration. 

“Our business knows everything there is to know about print distribution. We’ve been doing it for 100 years and are very good at being as efficient as possible,” Honderich said. “Digital distribution is not yet as well understood or ironed out. We need a more cohesive, organised strategy for the digital distribution of our content.”

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