TLDR; We should all be news product thinkers
After two exhilirating days during the NPA Summit (only the second time it’s organized and already such an iconic event!), I wanted to take some time to organize my thoughts and share some of the things I’ve learned. First and foremost: if you’re interested in innovation in journalism, it’s so important to think more holistically about news and news products. It’s not enough to produce a great story - you will have to make sure it reaches the public, too.
Thinking
Who are you creating your stories for? What kind of information do your audiences need? Do you know? Do you really know?
There were several session durin the Summit that focused on the importance of really understanding the needs of your audiences. If you want to create the right solution (whether that be a story, a product, a feature or something else entirely) you have to make sure you’re solving the right problem.
Newsrooms are traditionally bad at this. We come up with stories based on what we think is important for people to know, rather than understanding what kind of stories the communities we serve are looking for.
But if we create what readers want, the only things we’re producing are stories about puppies and scandals!
Really? Is that the direct feedback you got from your readers/listeners/viewers? Is that what they told you when you asked them about it? This may be a pattern you see emerging if you look at your pageview data, although I doubt that’s even true. But I’m here to tell you that pageviews are at best a shitty way to understand what people value, and at worst, they’re downright useless.
First of all, what’s going viral on social media isn’t necessarily viewed and clicked on by the people you’re producing journalism for. Second of all, people have different reasons to consume information-content such as news (I’ll refer to the User Needs model again here), and just because that video of a puppy getting its tongue stuck on an icecube is popular, doesn’t mean that the same people aren’t interested in a thorough analysis of the current situation in Ukraine at a different point in time.
Using a user needs-like model in your newsroom works in both qualitative in quantitative ways. Qualitative, because it helps you think about different formats and angles for stories you want to produce. You can absolutely decide that as a publication, you care about covering economics, even though that might be a less ‘popular’ topic if you only look at the pageviews. The question then becomes: given we care about covering this, how might we cover it in a way that serves our audiences’ needs?
Think about this: What I like about framing the question in this way is that it will automatically force you to think about who that audience actually is. Who do you want to create these stories for? Who are currently engaging with them? Remember - optimizing for the audience you currently have isn’t a very futureproof plan and leaves you vulnerable to being disrupted.
Learning
One of the most popular sessions during the NPA was about finding better metrics for value and impact. This is a great exercise that I hope to do at my own work in the near future, because again, it forces us to drill down into the core of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
Impact: what effect do you want your journalism to have on the world? What should happen in the world because of what you create?
Value: what effect do you want your journalism to have on your audiences? What should happen to their attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors?
Thinking about this as a team is a helpful way to uncover what your work should stand for. A possible answer might be:
Impact: we want our journalism to create a more informed democracy, so that people make better decisions as voters
Value: we want our audiences to be interested in the world around them
The next question becomes: how do you know that you’re succeeding? Traditionally, we might point to our pageviews (there they are again) and say: look, our stories are reaching thousands of people, so we’re doing well. Or we might say: look, people are spending a lot of time with our stories. That must mean they value them!
But that’s just us, layering assumptions over behavioral data without having any understanding as to whether this is true. Two issues arise from this approach:
We don’t know if the metrics we chose equal happier audiences. If all I need is some key information that can be found in the first paragraph of a story and I stop reading, content with the information I have — that isn’t reflected as such in the data.
If the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure (there’s Goodhart’s law again). Longer stories take longer to consume, thus it increases our average dwell time. That doesn’t mean we should only create 3K+ words stories, or two-hour podcasts.
So we need a different approach. This is a great scale that helps us understand what kind of information we need to know if we’re reaching our goals [source].
We valued an informed public and we wanted our audiences to be interested in the world around them, which you might translate as inspired.
How do we know if people are actually informed? We could use quizzes, one-sentence surveys, and look for contexts where our stories are used to create knowledge (in classrooms, for example)
How do we know if people are inspired? We could analyze the sentiment of online responses, hold user interviews and listen for ‘driveaway moments’
As you see, these methods are both quantitative and qualitative, and are harder to capture than simply looking at a dashboard to see how well a story ‘performed’. That’s not by accident: what’s worth knowing is often not that easy to measure.
Doing
One of my favorite sessions during the summit was about overcoming siloes (or boundaries) in organizations. It feels really validating that more people are struggling with these issues - and it felt even more validating to hear out loud that it’s mostly female-presenting folks in bridge roles who experience the emotional labor of making sure these bridges are actually built.
So, if you’re nodding your head right now because yes, our org is siloed to and it’s a not-great experience, what might you do?
Bringing people together, listen to their needs, and point out that their goals might not be so different after all. Different teams come at the problem from different angles, but that doesn’t mean they don’t actually want similar things.
Finding similar-minded people on different teams, who can be your go-to advocates when you need clamor for an initiative
Informal meetings that aren’t always about the work: getting to know other folks as people first
Being honest and transparent in your communication. It’s terrible to have to do something without understanding why. If you take that away, people might disagree, but at least they know why something is important or needs to happen.
Take the ‘Switzerland’ position: facilitate collaboration and bring out expertise in others. Your expertise is ‘process’ and bringing the subject matter experts closer together.
Note that even when you employ these tactics to the best of your abilities, that doesn’t mean you won’t run into (repeated) pushback. Things might go way slower than you’d like. People you’ve come to trust might leave the org, forcing you to look for new allies. All these issues are to be expected and there’s no silver bullet to overcome them. Sometimes, learning not to take these blowbacks personally is the best approach.
Reading
What do news readers really want to read about? If you really want to dive deep into the user needs for news, look no further than this report from the Reuters Institute.
4 tips for managing organizational change — change efforts often fail, but that doesn’t have to be the case. If you’re a change agent in your organization, these tips might help you plan your next success.
Should you ever not listen to user feedback? The key is listening to the underlying insight rather than the high-level feedback.
I had a great time at the NPA, both as a participant and as a facilitator. After two days of sensory overload and huge FOMO, I’m happy to have a weekend off to synthesize the information I took home and hopefully emerge as a better, more emphatic product thinker.