A new year, new goals. What should those be for the modern, ambitious newsroom? There is one clear answer: becoming audience centric.
Audiences are looking for authentic news brands that design their reporting and storytelling truly to serve their readers’ needs and interests. The goal is to connect, involve, and build trust by focusing on the challenges and perspectives of the audience.
This means that storytellers need to position themselves ever more clearly within niches - and what those niches look like should not and cannot be decided behind a desk. It requires an active dialogue with your audience and a move away from a one-way broadcasting mindset.
Why’s this necessary?
Dutch media consultant, Elger van der Wel, set out the various challenges facing news organisations today in a recent newsletter. Distilled, they look something like this:
The influence of platforms and big tech is significant
Google Discover has become a key driver of traffic, but that (and the likes of Google and Facebook etc) cannot be relied upon long term, creating uncertainty about where and how to deploy resources
Trust is key, but it’s in short supply
AI has created an abundance of text and imagery, but into an already saturated market, there’s a clear concern about what’s real - and what isn’t. Audiences are increasingly skeptical and harder to engage with, evidenced by a further, systemic decrease in trust of traditional institutions
Changing audience behaviours need to be monitored closely
There’s a widespread move towards watching, over reading - and a tendency for audiences (particularly younger audiences) to favour individual journalists and media influencers over legacy brands
In the face of these developments and changes, it’s perhaps no surprise that news media’s authority is weakening. The emerging reality is certainly challenging. With audiences holding so much power, it’s essential that newsrooms double down on effective engagement strategies - and this is where audience centricity comes in.
A manifesto for building audience centric newsrooms
Smartocto recently wrote the first version of a manifesto that answers the question of how to become an audience centric newsroom. The manifesto emerged from research conducted for a webinar (with further input from Marcela Kunova and Dmitry Shishkin during the session) as well as with contributions from professionals who attended.
This is intended to be a working document, and to ensure that it is robust and useful across the industry, we invite professionals (like you?) to share their thoughts and comments. The ten points we have so far: