What News Audiences Really Want

This story about what audiences need from the news is part of The Solutions Effect, a monthly newsletter covering the best of solutions journalism in the sustainability and social impact space. If you aren't already getting this newsletter, you can sign up here.

Most people feel the news industry helps them stay up to date with what’s going on, but the steady stream of stories is also relentless. A growing group of news consumers (39 percent) feel “worn out” by the sheer amount of news. Many say stories about wars, disasters, and politics are squeezing out other topics. 

While the media is doing a good job of addressing the two needs most cited by audiences — updating and educating them — it’s lagging on two other things the majority of people find important: providing different perspectives on issues and offering more hope and optimism. 

At least that’s the consensus of the 95,000 people from 47 countries surveyed for this year’s Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford. The report is the biggest ongoing study of news consumption in the world. It breaks down digital news audiences' consumption habits and behaviors each year. And for over a decade, Nic Newman, lead author and senior research associate at Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, has made sense of it all. 

This year’s report devoted a section to the user needs model, a concept more news organizations are turning to in the face of declining readership, loss of trust and a flooded news market. 

“Academics and social scientists have talked about user needs for quite a long time in different ways,” Newman said. “People, in traditional news consumption, used to quite often not read the news, flick over it, and go to the sports or what was happening in their local community … In recent years, because of the struggle of engaging, various user needs models have been popularized.”

Originally coined by the BBC and since evolved by many other organizations and journalists, the model focuses on structuring content in a way that satisfies the basic things people want from the news and recognizing that those wants can be more than just providing pure facts without subjectivity or nuance, which was once considered the gold standard of journalism. 

“What [the BBC] broadly found when they looked at the data was that people were not paying as much attention to the updating function but were paying more attention if you [entertained] people or inspired people, particularly around difficult stories like climate change,” Newman said. “The data tells you that, if you take the doomsday scenario approach, people just kind of turn away. So publishers are really looking to use this model to find more uplifting or constructive ways of telling stories that engage people.”

The report found that people want stories with diverse perspectives, stories they haven’t heard of before and stories that give them hope, Newman said. But they aren’t finding enough of them. 

“If you just read newspapers, you really would think the world was without any hope. It’s this constant bombardment of negative stuff, and it's not actually like that. It's not a true reflection of what's going on in the world,” Newman said. “There's a lot of really interesting stuff going on, a lot of progress in loads of areas. And that tends to get squeezed out.”

While coverage of extreme weather events and missed climate targets informs, stories of people who devote their lives to making progress can inspire.

“I think that's really critical, to cover these huge stories that don't necessarily have a top to them, that don't always have that immediate hook, and bring them to life and make them relevant,” Newman said. “But in a rounded, 360-degree way. That is what audiences want. They don't want to just have the difficult stuff, but they don't want to not have difficult stuff. They want to have a better balance.” 

Readers also don’t want the news to be less rigorous or downplayed, a common misconception of some approaches newsrooms take to meet user needs, like solutions journalism and constructive journalism, Newman said. Also a solutions-focused approach, constructive journalism emphasizes delving into the nuance of a topic and promoting democratic conversation to leave audiences feeling hopeful and motivated. It’s particularly popular in Europe. 

These solutions-oriented approaches can address the areas where audiences feel newsrooms are lacking. Both solutions and constructive journalism shift the narrative from emphasizing the negatives to emphasizing action and hope. In that pursuit, journalists often cover unique stories that bring new perspectives forward, because that’s prioritized in the practice and because it’s simply not the norm to report that way. 

Only about 35 percent of those who avoid the news are interested in the latest updates on the big daily stories, according to last year’s Digital News Report. Yet 55 percent are interested in positive stories, and 46 percent are interested in stories about solutions. 

But it remains to be seen whether these new approaches will influence industry-wide change. 

“A lot of great solutions journalism is just looking at difficult stories in a different way,” Newman said. “Whether that actually moves the dial and sufficiently changes the vast majority of journalism — which continues to be negative because negative stuff attracts your attention — or is it just a drop in the ocean? That's what we're trying to work out.”

Nevertheless, newsrooms are taking these ideas seriously, Newman said. In a time of decreasing trust in the media and ever-increasing options for where to find information, they recognize it’s important to put effort into engaging people and building trust. Over the past few years, concepts like user needs and solutions-focused coverage moved away from the fringe and toward the heart of the conversation.

To me, this is all about reconsidering what we think of as “good” journalism. That doesn’t mean tossing out everything and starting over, but why not evolve parts of the traditional news model to make it more relevant to what today’s audiences need? Can it still be the gold standard if swaths of people actively avoid it? We write for them, after all. 

“Good journalism is lots of different things, but it's absolutely about the fundamentals,” Newman said. “Many of those things shouldn't change and haven't changed. It's about holding rich and powerful people to account. It's about casting light in areas where otherwise there would be darkness. It's also about taking a balanced view and putting together a package of things that means that people pay attention, that they have a range of things to talk about. It's partly about how we curate what's going on, and what's important in the world.”

All the talk about declining interest in the news and the need to rethink the norms embedded in the foundation of journalism can be daunting and disheartening. But there’s reason for hope in this story, too. 

“The way I look at it is, it has never been more interesting or more exciting. There are so many possibilities now to tell stories in different ways: more cheaply, more effectively, to engage people, to connect with people,” Newman said. “These to me, are all opportunities to make journalism better. Obviously, there are challenges around funding, sustainability, engagement. But overall, I'm optimistic. People always need news.”

I couldn’t agree more.