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News Alchemists #10: "What audiences really want: For journalists to connect with them as people."

Welcome to another edition of the News Alchemists newsletter!

My name is Mattia, and this is the very orange email I send you once a week to provide you with a little hope about journalism, and about the potential to redefine its mission and its role in our lives. 🧡

But how exactly can we find that hope? I believe the ingredients include information, inspiration, examples, and resources:

💿 Information: That journalism needs to change is not an opinion, but a reality clearly established by years of declining trust and engagement. Research is telling us what we need to know – or, quoting a friend: "We have the evidence!" It's time to act on that evidence with more focus and more urgency.

💡 Inspiration: There are many people, inside and outside the journalism industry, who generously share their reflections, learnings, and ideas. I highlight many of them with a genie (🧞) in these emails. Let's learn with them.

📚 Examples: At a time when most journalism organisations are struggling to stay viable, some others are thriving. They understood the need to change, to have a clear mission and a relatable brand, and they consistently provide real value to their communities. They are showing us that another type of journalism is possible, and profitable. I highlight many of them with a 🧩 because their success gives us a piece of the puzzle.

🧭 Resources: Tools, frameworks, guides, support groups that aim to make it easier for others to learn from all of the above and implement such lessons in our own work.

Like every categorisation, this is not perfect. Maybe I missed one more category. Maybe "inspiration" and "information" are not the right words. What do you think? What gives you hope? Reply to this email to let me know.

Every link I share in these emails wants to give you at least one of the four ingredients. Let's see if today presents a good mix, shall we?

In a study published last year, researchers Claudia Mellado and Constanza Gajardo interviewed journalists and audience members in Chile about their ideas on what constitutes good journalism. The responses given by the two sides were remarkably different. 🧞Mark Coddington and 🧞Seth Lewis analyse the findings in their RQ1 newsletter (already featured in #3):

"Journalists emphasized exactly the values that you would expect: objectivity, independence, accuracy, and newsworthiness, or covering news in the public interest. [...] Instead of the journalists’ traditional professional values, audiences emphasized human elements: approachability, empathy, and skills in communicating clearly and in ways that emotionally resonate."

Bridging this gap should be our number one, two and three priority. But, as the authors of the study highlight, this won't happen unless journalists begin to align with their audiences beyond a utilitarian approach: "This alignment must stem not only from conviction but also from a place of honesty. [...] Incorporating the audience as a legitimate and valued stakeholder seems essential for fostering a symbiotic relationship." Preach!

🧞Sophie van Oostvoorn writes an excellent newsletter about journalism, audiences and innovation. In the last edition, she talks about service journalism and reflects back on the experience of the pandemic, with a question that is worth exploring: "During the pandemic, newsrooms published much more about the everyday problems people faced – and trust, interest, and engagement with news media increased. Coincidence?"

Interesting analysis by Gretel Kahn of the Reuters Institute, who spoke with employee-owned news organisations from Argentina, France, Scotland, Spain and Uruguay – including 🧩 elDiario.es, which reached the 100,000 members milestone just a few days ago. Can this ownership model help organisations protect their independence, create a closer relationship with their audience, and ultimately lead to financial sustainability? I'm intrigued.

Let's stay on the topic of funding and business models: 🧞Peter Erdelyi, director of the Budapest-based Center for Sustainable Media, writes witty and insightful essays on the topic in the Media Finance Monitor. In this piece, he shares his frustration with how the journalism industry's funding fixation has evolved into an unhelpful moral purity test, where no source of funding is clean enough to make us truly independent, and my chosen funding model is always purer than yours. But:

"The real measure of our work isn't the immaculate purity of our financial statements but the impact of our journalism. Are we helping people understand their world? Are we holding power to account? Are we creating value for our communities? Those are the questions that should keep us up at night — not whether our particular funding model would earn us an A+ on some imaginary journalistic ethics exam."

(The subheading "Fund me, fund me, say that you fund me!" made me cackle. 🎶 Tune.)

I'm really enjoying the musings on community development that 🧞Mili Semlani is sharing on LinkedIn this year, and this is no exception: "The success of communities is not in technological superiority but intentional design choices that put community needs first. What does this mean for those of us building and nurturing communities? It means creating spaces that invite our full humanity, [...] And it means measuring success not by scale or engagement metrics, but by the quality of connection and the sense of belonging we create."

Straight off the bat: I love to see the Venn diagram I designed last year to represent the vision behind News Alchemists (we'll talk about it, don't worry) resonating with people and being re-shared. Disclaimer out of the way, don't miss this piece by 🧞Madeleine White, which offers a number of different examples to understand what 'audience-first' means in practice.

In collaboration with 🧞Dmitry Shishkin and Ringier Media International, Smartocto analysed more than 16,000 articles to answer this question. The results are pretty clear: articles focused around a single user need get more readers; score higher on metrics that relate to loyalty; and the reader experience is deeper.

Want more? 📚 Check out the previous editions

In four weeks, I will be on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia with Smartocto's CEO Erik van Heeswijk, as well as Karljin Goossen of NPO, and media consultant Maike Olij:

🔖 Journalism’s public value: balancing individual metrics and societal impact

Are you also going to be in Perugia? Let me know and let's meet up! 🙌

P.S.: Not one email from fellow fans of The Newsroom after the Will McAvoy GIFs I put in the last edition. I'm very disappointed.

Published by:

Mattia Peretti

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