No One's Reading This

20 Minuten was once the paper Swiss commuters read between two stops. In May 2026 the news brand moved that habit to the thumb with 20 Minuten Shorts, a vertical video feed inside its own app. Every clip is curated by hand and checked by the newsroom.

Kerstin sits down with Basil Honegger, Head of Video News and member of the editorial board at 20 Minuten, to talk about what it took technically to build a feed inside a news app and whether people who swipe ever go back to reading. They also cover the biggest lessons since launch and the one skill Basil thinks every journalist needs to master today.

Siv Juvik Tveitnes was appointed INMA's new president this year, on top of running Schibsted Media, the company behind VG, Aftenposten or Podme. Kerstin met her in Vail at the INMA CEO Roundtable, where shared hikes turned into an hour-long conversation. Siv sums up the industry's biggest miscalculation about young audiences in a few words: "They never arrived.“ From there, Kerstin and Siv get into why relevance beats seriousness, why younger audiences trust creators over brands, the self-critical culture Siv wants to protect at Schibsted, and what it actually means to bet against your own legacy business. They also cover Schibsted's OpenAI partnership and the fully AI-run VGX newsroom experiment.

Publishers keep saying the same thing: their teams need to act more like creators. But where to start?

Adriana built the STEPP Framework after two years inside newsroom-creator partnerships that worked, and plenty that didn't. But this conversation goes past the framework everyone already quotes. Adriana and Kerstin talk about the fear newsrooms won't say out loud, the difference between treating a creator like a colleague and treating them like a marketing channel, and why small and regional newsrooms have a real advantage when working with creators.

They get into who actually makes the best creator partner, does not have to be a journalist. They also cover ecosystem mapping, why long-term relationships beat one-off campaigns, and what it actually takes to build trust between a newsroom and the people it's trying to reach.

Host: Kerstin Hasse, Young Audiences Initiative Lead, INMA Guest: Adriana Lacy, Founder & CEO, Field Nine Group

Dmitry Shishkin was once introduced on stage as the Godfather of User Needs. His reaction said everything about someone who started all of this with a practical question at the BBC in 2016: why have we stopped producing content that answers what audiences actually need?

In this episode, Kerstin sits down with Dmitry Shiskin, independent media strategist and the mind behind the User Needs framework, to ask why legacy media is still losing ground a decade after the answer was hiding in plain sight. The Digital News Report 2026 just confirmed what the User Needs model has been arguing for a decade: audiences know exactly what they want and they're finding it elsewhere. Social has overtaken TV and news websites as the primary news source globally for the first time ever. 27% of people get news from creators weekly. And newsrooms are still telling their teams to be more inspiring.

They go deep into what the Sports User Needs Model reveals about where editorial output actually goes, why "be more inspiring" is a brief and not a strategy, and what Dmitry calls the Agents Readiness Layer, his framework for surviving an AI-mediated information environment where your nuances of reporting risk being flattened into a single sentence.

Guest: Dmitry Shishkin, independent media strategist

Host: Kerstin Hasse, Young Audiences Initiative Lead, INMA

Kerstin Hasse sits down with Nic Newman, Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute. Nic led the Digital News Report for fourteen years - the world's most influential annual study of news consumption. This year, he handed the lead authorship to Jim Egan and turned his attention to one thing: creators.

27% of people globally now get news from creators every week. Nic wrote the chapter. He's here to explain what that number actually means and what publishers keep getting wrong when they read it.

Kerstin and Nic cover the four creator ecosystems the report maps and why the «bring them to our platforms» logic is structurally broken.

And yes Kerstin also asked Nic what it actually feels like to hand something over you built from scratch.

Find the full report here: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026

Kerstin Hasse sits down with Emily Schario, Head of Content and co-founder of The B-Side, Boston Globe Media's daily newsletter for young Bostonians. What started as an internal pitch at an innovation day in 2021 has grown into a very compelling young audience product in local news: 60,000 subscribers, a 60% open rate, and a paid membership model built around events and community rather than paywalled content.

Emily doesn't just run The B-Side, she is The B-Side. She co-writes the content, films videos - and she is the face of the product. Sometimes literally: she once ran a stretch of the Boston Marathon to test whether you can churn butter while jogging. (Turns out: You can.) In this conversation, she talks about building a media product inside a legacy organization with almost no team, what it takes to earn the trust of an audience that has never paid for news, and what happened when the journalist and the brand became the same person.

A chart got passed around on LinkedIn last year showing Washington Post video numbers cratering right after Dave Jorgenson left - and how his own numbers were climbing. Publishers looked at it and panicked: Is this what is happening when you bet on a voice in your newsroom?

In this episode, Kerstin Hasse sits down with the journalist who built one of the most loyal young audiences in American news media – from inside a legacy newsroom, with a small budget, no blueprint, and a platform his colleagues weren't sure they should be on. Dave Jorgenson and her talk about what it actually takes to grow an audience, why loyalty follows people and not mastheads, and what most publishers still refuse to understand about how trust works. And Dave reveals whether there was anything – anything at all – that could have made him stay at the Post.

What can a media startup learn from a 80-year-old institution – and what can a legacy publisher learn back? In this special live episode from the INMA World Congress in Berlin, Kerstin Hasse sits down with Rainer Esser (Die Zeit) and Sruthi Gottipati (Spot On) for a cross-generational conversation on leadership, loyalty, and the future of media. Including the question neither of them saw coming: what would you do if you had each other's job for one day?

Publishers have been saying it for years: young audiences don't pay. PodMe has 200,000 subscribers, and more than half of them are under 35.

In this episode, Kerstin Hasse talks to Kristin Ward Heimdal, who leads PodMe, Schibsted's paid podcast platform. They discuss why Schibsted started investing in the start-up, what happened when they first tried a hard paywall, and why the true crime genre is now being developed closer to the newsroom rather than acquired from independent creators.

Kristin also explains what actually drives young people's willingness to pay — and why the answer has less to do with format and more to do with what publishers are trying to sell them.

If your organization is still treating paid audio as a side experiment, this conversation is worth your time.

Guest: Kristin Ward Heimdahl, Head of Podme

Host: Kerstin Hasse, Young Audiences Initiative Lead, INMA

One year ago, Der Spiegel merged three digital teams into one. In a newsroom where text still carries most of the editorial weight, what happens when video, audio, and social suddenly sit at the same table?

Kerstin Hasse is talking to Aleksandra Janevska, Deputy Head of Crossmedia at Der Spiegel, about what it takes to restructure a newsroom from the inside and what happens when you stop organizing by medium and start organizing by format instead.

They discuss what's working, what Der Spiegel decided to stop, including a podcast ending after two years and what that process revealed about making editorial decisions with clarity. They also dig into fact-checking as a format and why "Sagen, was ist" – say what is – turns out to be not just a founding editorial principle, but a natural fit for the platforms where young audiences are. Plus: the growing role of on-camera personalities, and what it looks like when a major investigative story goes viral across every platform at once.

This conversation was originally recorded as a live INMA Young Audiences Initiative webinar. Listen, share, subscribe! More infos about the International Media Association and the Young Audiences Initiative supported by Knight Foundation at inma.org

Guest: Aleksandra Janevska, Deputy Head of Crossmedia, Der Spiegel

Host: Kerstin Hasse, Young Audiences Initiative Lead, INMA