🔶 News Alchemists #34: Audience-centric journalism = Change-centric journalism

Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter — which I’m sending this week from Cape Town 🇿🇦

This city... Wow. 

I’m here to wrap up the project I’ve been working on with the Daily Maverick team since the start of the year, to attend The Gathering (the conference that Daily Maverick organises every year to bring their community together), and, well, to enjoy everything that this beautiful city has to offer.

While here, I also gave a presentation about ‘Audience-centric journalism’ to the newsroom — which was a tiny bit stressful to prepare since I consider Daily Maverick among the most audience-centric organisations I know (imposter syndrome through the roof).

Ultimately though, I landed on a concept that felt new, at least to me, and I built the presentation around it. More than a concept, it's an equation:

Audience-centric journalism = Change-centric journalism

Remember the awesome Change-centric journalism project by Jazmín Acuña that I shared two weeks ago? It's based on the idea that good journalism should distinguish itself by the quality of change it facilitates.

Initially, I didn't pay much attention to that last word: facilitates. But what does facilitating change means if not working in service of our audiences so that they can bring positive change to the world, with a little help from the information and understanding we provide?

It's a half-baked thought. Let me know what you think.

Join the debate on the purpose of journalism

Last week, I told you about JR3 Debate, the second step of the project I've been working on with the Knight Lab at Northwestern University since the beginning of the year.

JR3 Debate is a simple but ambitious collaborative document that we set up to host a global discussion on the purpose of journalism. We invited you – and everyone else we could reach online – to participate in the discussion, and it's been so cool to see the conversations that developed in there!

Some comments that stood out to me:

❝ As it relates to local journalism, I think the purpose can be to create a shared sense of place and to chronicle the stories and narratives of a place so that people can see themselves and their experiences reflected. This purpose also allows for more inclusive ways of doing journalism, including gatherings, events and live journalism.❞ [ 💬 What do you think of that? Reply with your own thoughts.]

❝ From a product perspective: if your product makes people feel miserable so that they stop using it altogether, you're not doing a good job. We can't directly control anything about how people consume the journalism we provide, but we're also famously bad at aftercare/contextualizing events to make them feel less like terror and doom.❞ [ 💬 Disagree? Share what you think.]

❝ I think this is where genuine audience engagement comes into play, because it transforms journalism from a broadcasting activity which is one sided to an exchange of ideas where both sides benefit from the process: journalists understand what audiences need and try and accommodate that to entice more support and feedback, and audiences understand how journalism can help them so they feel incentivised to support journalists and news orgs because now they can see the value.❞ [ 💬 What do you think? Join the conversation here.]

👉 There are many more interesting conversations in JR3 Debate. Check them out.

I still want to know what you think of this newsletter

I let you off the hook last week (aka: I forgot to remind you) but I would still be really really really grateful if you could spare a couple of minutes to fill in the reader survey with your own thoughts on this newsletter.

What is your favourite thing about the newsletter? What improvement would make it better for you? How many of the seven links do you usually open? These are some of the questions you will find in the survey, and I mean it when I say that even if you answer only one of them, it will already be useful and much appreciated.

How happy will I be when you fill in the survey? This happy:

Best of links so far

And now, your seven links of the week 📚 Not new links though. I didn't have time last week to curate a new batch, so I'm relying on the noble art of recycling and offering you a sort of "Best of": seven of the most-clicked links from the first 30 editions of this newsletter. (I mixed them up, this is not a ranking.)

See you next week! 👋

1. What if the future of local journalism was more playful? 👉 LINK

By 🧞Samantha Ragland

2. Zetland’s Lea Korsgaard on journalism as a service – and a product 👉 LINK

With 🧞Lea Korsgaard

3. Local journalism is in the wrong business 👉 LINK

By 🧞Max Kabat

4. The future of journalism isn't AI. It's the audience. And it always has been. 👉 LINK

By 🧞Adriana Lacy

5. Stop pretending journalism matters on its own 👉 LINK

By 🧞Patrick Boehler

6. Shaping tomorrow: Collective efforts for the future of European journalism 👉 LINK

By 🧞Shirish Kulkarni

7. I'm never going to trust your news organization 👉 LINK

By 🧞Heather Bryant