RND Leaders Discuss Platform Dependency and Subscription Strategy

In an interview with MEEDIA, Denni Klein and Lina Timm, the co-CEOs of Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) within the Madsack Mediengruppe, discuss their first nine months in leadership. They outline their 'Abo First' and 'Regionaljournalismus First' strategy, emphasizing direct customer relationships to reduce platform dependency. The RND network partners with 139 media outlets and has grown digital subscriptions to about 375,000, with a 10-15% growth in Plus-Abos despite industry stagnation. They highlight their newsletter initiative (70+ local '5in5' newsletters, 1.1 million total newsletter subscriptions) as a key tool for loyalty and churn reduction. The leaders also address their shift away from optimizing for both advertising and subscription, their use of AI for content processing, and a major investment in a new data platform/CDP to power hyper-personalization.