From digital first to audience first

For more than a decade, newsrooms in traditional media have been saying that they need to adopt a ‘digital first’ strategy. Digital first is still a widely used slogan, but what does it actually mean in 2025?

The original idea behind digital first was that staff working in radio, television and print should focus a little less on their flagship media. Publish the first version of the story online, then decide how to distribute it through the traditional channels.

It was an excellent strategy to make newsrooms realise that their future would be predominantly digital. The best anecdote illustrating the difficult cultural shift that this required comes from a Dutch newspaper: a reporter answered the phone and was confronted by a critical reader. Something was wrong in the story published on their website. The reporter replied: I work for the printed paper, not for the website, and then hung up.

For a long time, online output was seen as inferior, because newsrooms applied lower standards before publishing. In most professional newsrooms we can now look back at this with a wry smile, because those days are clearly behind us.

Yet the dominance of the old media is still visible in day-to-day practice. Even social media teams (would we, ten years ago, ever have imagined that social media desks would exist?) are often busy trimming television segments so that they can be repurposed for Instagram or TikTok. The workflow still serves the old centre of gravity.

Social first?

The temptation is to declare a new mantra. Social first. Be where the audience first goes for its information.

Digital consultant Jaap van Zessen immediately raises doubts about this strategy. “Most clients I speak to are actually cautious about focusing too heavily on their presence on social media and their discoverability on Google. It’s understandable: what happens if the traffic coming from those channels to their own platform shrinks even further, due to AI and new algorithmic changes? I think digital first is now increasingly interpreted as this: how do I put my own digital channels in a primary position and reduce my dependence on big tech?”

Story first?

Story first might be an elegant way to reframe the strategy. After all, don’t most publications start as a story? As a journalist you come across a topic, you have a sense of what you want to tell your audience, but you must then shape the material according to the demands of the platform where you plan to publish it.

That is where data can help. At smartocto the implicit question before publishing is always: what would success look like? Past performance provides clues, and the User Needs for News Model helps shape stories with a clear sense of the audience’s underlying need.

Yet story first is still a one-way view. It modernises the workflow without questioning the relationship.

Audience first!

And that seems to be the first step towards what digital first now truly is: audience first. The idea is as follows: if you place the story at the centre, you are still essentially broadcasting. As Sophie van Oostvoorn summarises in a whitepaper (translated here from the original Dutch): “in the old tradition, the relationship between newsroom and audience is transactional. Information flows from newsroom to audience, and the audience pays with money or data. She argues instead that publishers should be looking at transitioning to production-oriented engagement, an approach built on reciprocity and community.

The idea behind this shift is that today’s online culture of constant commentary and eroding institutional trust needs to be redirected, not resisted. Journalism still possesses the tools for that task: independence, verification, and an instinct for balance between power and accountability. Audience first aligns those instincts with contemporary behaviour.

This may sound idealistic, but a recent article on the INMA website by Dorinne Hoss of Arc XP shows that this evolution also makes business sense: “What used to be a one-way broadcast is now a conversation, an evolving, dynamic exchange between publisher and audience.”

Francesca Dumas of Contribly summarises it as the quiet revolution happening in the industry: “Not louder content. Not more content. But co-created content. A newsroom re-engineered around relationships, not reach.”

Four examples of audience-first projects

Such ideas are hardly new. Jay Rosen’s work on civic journalism was already expressing the benefits of placing the public at the centre of democratic reporting process as early as 2001. Later movements - collaborative media, participatory journalism, grassroots journalism, street journalism - all pushed towards a more reciprocal relationship.

Solutions journalism added the requirement that stories should help audiences navigate real-world challenges. In a smartocto webinar earlier this year we discussed constructive journalism during elections, showcasing data on stories that have inspired audiences to take action.

The difference today is that digital environments make these approaches scalable, measurable and deeply integrated into the publishing process.

So let us conclude with three examples of audience first as the new digital first, where audience involvement is woven into the digital character of the publication. Hopefully they offer you inspiration for a renewed digital first strategy.

• Regional broadcaster Omroep West (a smartocto client) collects gifts for children in low-income families
  Rather than reporting on a charity drive, Omroep West partnered with a foundation to organise its own initiative to collect presents for children in families who cannot afford them. Last year, this resulted in 121,000 gifts being donated by its own audience. It generated a stream of stories, but above all fostered a sense of community and cheerful public engagement.
  
• German regional news service OVB24 lets readers decide what the worst thing in their hometown is and which brewery is the best
  When the newsroom asked readers to name the worst thing in their region, the answer was a dangerous crossroads. This led to a series of articles and videos, and journalists approached the mayor for a response. The outcome? The municipality modified the junction after public input, making it safer.
  
  Too serious? OVB24 is like: hold my beer. Yes, the editing team organised a beer battle. "It was built up like a soccer-tournament", editor-in-chief Martin Vodermair explains: "Always two breweries (out of our region) fought against each other. The winner went to the next round till the final. In each battle our voters could win beer from the breweries."

• The Washington Post’s “Ask the Post initiative”, powered by retrieval-augmented AI
  The INMA article cited earlier explains how technology can become central to audience-first thinking. Do we overwhelm readers with dozens of articles a day, or do we provide only the information that an individual specifically requests? Readers pose questions and receive responses grounded in verified archives, turning news consumption into a two-way exchange.
  
• NPR’s Climate Solutions Week
  Once a year, NPR hands the initiative to its audience by focusing on what might help them deal with climate change. Each edition has a theme, and the stories are rich in Help me and Connect me elements (to refer back to the user needs model once more). It requires a shift in thinking to address major issues in this way, rather than simply following the political agenda as has been the norm. But, by removing the political sting from climate coverage, beautiful things can emerge, as the Solutions Journalism Network argues.

Digital first once forced newsrooms to acknowledge where their future lay. Audience first demands something harder: that they rethink why they publish at all. Not to fill channels, not to feed algorithms, but to rebuild a relationship that has frayed in the digital age.

The technology is finally mature enough to support that ambition. The harder question is now waiting for an answer from the newsrooms themselves.