From niche to wild

IrpiMedia as an independent newsroom, is developing multiple experimental products in order to diversify revenue streams (currently IRPI is supported by philanthropy, grants, membership program and a tiny percentage of product selling) but most importantly in order to diversify and expand audience. Over the course of 2024, we have developed and launched three new experimental products: books, a weekly podcast (called Newsroom) and a subscribers-only newsletter on one of our main expertises, Italian mafias in the world. Now we want to bring these products to a next phase where they get distributed to an increasingly larger audience and become a reference point for specific target audiences.

For this specific project, we wish to aim at growing one of these three products, namely the weekly podcast. Our target group for this product is young people between 20 and 40 years old, namely university students and young professionals who are used to digital products alreayd, who are among the highest consumers of podcast products and who have showed, in 2024 data, to be among the most loyal to our weekly podcast product so far. The problem is how to reach a larger amount of followers within this target group, that although is very keen to listen to podcasts and follow a show on Spotify, is also "bombarded" by similar (not in terms of content, but in terms of format) products published by competitors. "Newsroom" is the only weekly podcast dedicated to investigative journalism in Italy, and that makes it unique, and potentially extremely interesting and important to our target audience. Young people are hungry with investigations, but they might not go for the long read. Instead, they prefer reading Instagram carousel and listening to a podcast that condenses the core of an investigation. This is what Newsroom has been doing, but we now wish to develop it further to have even more potential.

Given IrpiMedia is not a mainstream media, the challenge is how to go wild, namely how to make sure Newsroom because a widely consumed podcast, able to convey public interest information among our target audience and able to funnel this very audience back to the rest of the IrpiMedia publications (especially the online magazine, but also newsletters, books etc).