Audiences are looking for authentic news brands that truly design their reporting and storytelling 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 storytellers need to position themselves ever more clearly within niches — and what those niches look like should not and cannot be decided from behind a desk. It requires an active dialogue with your audience and a move away from a one-way broadcasting mindset.

Why the shift is 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 toward watching instead of reading. There’s also 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 news media’s authority is weakening. The emerging reality is certainly challenging.

With audiences holding so much power, it’s essential newsrooms double down on effective engagement strategies. 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. To ensure it is robust and useful across the industry, we invite professionals (like you) to share their thoughts and comments.

These are the 10 points we have so far:

1. Know who you are.

Understand why people come to your platform for information and write it down. How? Look at your 50 best- and 50 worst-performing articles over a longer period of time to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Ask yourself what would happen to your audience if you no longer existed tomorrow.

This exercise should lead to a clear set of user needs. Are you there for inspiration, help, humour, or connection with others? User needs are the proxy for audience centricity.

2. Talk to your audience.

Organise dialogues with your audience through webinars or even live events. Ask them what they think of your journalism’s content through surveys. Then, use their language in your publications or even in the navigation and sections of your Web site.

Decision makers should be part of this conversation themselves, or at least be able to witness it firsthand.

3. Change the culture.

Tools are useful, but mindset is vital. Appoint ambassadors in the newsroom — professionals who, in every meeting, ask which user need is being served and why. These ambassadors should actively push for collecting questions and feedback from users.

Pay attention to language as well. This isn’t an audience engagement manager, but an audience engagement editor. The entire editing team needs to be involved.

4. Aim for loyalty.

If you value a long-term, meaningful relationship with your audience, loyalty should be the key metric you optimise for. Loyal users return more often, consume more content, and are more willing to engage and pay.

5. Treat sections as “mini brands.”

Start seeing your most important sections as individual brands. Describe and position them around specific user needs. This gives each section its own character, which strengthens recognition and loyalty. Timing, channel, navigation, and format all play a role. Every section should have its own clear identity.

6. Make use of smart editorial analytics.

Analytics systems are becoming smarter by the day. They offer real time suggestions, can think along with you, are AI-driven, and structurally identify opportunities humans cannot keep up with in the daily rush.

Use these tools intelligently and functionally to improve your work, not to hand it over. They are a means, not an end.

7. Keep going.

Do not expect miracles from the first article you publish with this mindset. Audience centricity needs to be an integral part of your strategy, and that implies a long-term commitment. It is part of digital transformation, and that does not happen overnight. It requires perseverance and persistence. The work is never finished.

8. Actively build niches.

The popularity of newsletters and podcasts is no coincidence. Find and develop your niche by experimenting within a single section. Build mini experts in your newsroom. Claim topics that truly matter to you and cover them, together with experts, from multiple angles to tell the full story. Use these insights to strengthen other sections step by step.

9. Fail forward.

Embrace experimentation. Innovation and experimentation go hand in hand. Actively look for new ways to reach and engage people. Dare to break things. Dare to make mistakes. Learn from them and use those insights as the starting point for the next experiment.

10. Co-create. Use the wisdom of the crowd.

Audience centricity cannot exist without taking your audience seriously. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” wrote Stephen R. Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Empathic listening is the foundation for better communication and trust, but the best way of exposing that you have listened is to use the input in your reporting.

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