🔶 News Alchemists #43: "We often underestimate how much readers appreciate being treated like humans."

Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter! – On a Wednesday for once – did you even notice? 🙃

And a first welcome to the (many!) new subscribers who joined us in the last week from – take a deep breath with me... GMA Network, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Fuller Project, VRT, De Tijd, The Quarry, E24, MDIF, WAN-IFRA, the World Economic Forum, GFMD, the University of Thessaloniki, the Italian association of foundations and philanthropic organisations, and all of you brave souls working independently.

Today I want to talk about engagement. In journalism nowadays we are obsessed with it. And for good reasons.

I'm not talking about sterile engagement metrics, I mean genuine, active engagement: people participating in the conversations we host in comment sections and community platforms; people replying to the newsletters we send; resharing the content we produce with words of praise; etc.

I celebrate this type of engagement all the time in this newsletter. It's usually a sign of a healthy business, and it makes us feel good too: someone notices what we're doing, someone cares.

And yet the contrarian in me lately has been wondering if there aren't also risks in chasing engagement all the time. Has engagement become another thing that we confuse for being the goal of everything we do, while instead not everything we produce is meant to lead to it?

Maybe some things are valuable even if they don't produce engagement? Maybe you're tired of all of these rhetorical questions?

Let me explain with a concrete example.

For a long time after I started sending this newsletter, I wanted engagement. I wanted to receive your replies, and I was asking lots of questions to try to encourage you to reply. ("What gives you hope? Reply to this email to let me know." Or: "Would you be interested in an online community?" Or: "Any fans of The Newsroom here? Don't tell me I'm the only one." Yes, you could smell the desperation.) I wanted you to engage.

If you were to measure the success of this newsletter in terms of engagement, you could say that it is a failure. On average, only a couple of readers each week reply to the newsletter. And maybe one or two more react to it or share it on other channels.

But the subscriber base keeps growing, the open rates are good and steady and, most importantly, every time I get the opportunity to have a conversation with my readers, you tell me how useful the newsletter is for you: "It introduces me to people and organisations I never heard of." "It saves me a lot of time." "I used the examples you shared to prepare a presentation / a class for my students."

Few replies? Little engagement? I guess it's ok. It appears that the value of my newsletter is to be measured in usefulness rather than engagement.

So here's the question I'm leaving you with today: is there a product or project where you're chasing engagement, maybe feeling disappointed because it doesn't materialise, and that's preventing you from recognising and celebrating other types of value you're already creating for your audience with that same product/project?

Let me know by replying to this email! Nah, I'm kidding: just discuss it with your colleagues, that might be more useful 😉

It's time for the seven links. See you next week!

1. We often underestimate how much readers appreciate being treated like humans. 👉 LINK

"I’ve been thinking a lot about audience engagement recently…", writes 🧞Sudeshna Chanda on LinkedIn. (See? I wasn't the only one.)

"Teams often underestimate how much readers appreciate being treated like humans. Not segments. Not 'target audiences'. Just plain humans with a full life beyond their identity as a 'news reader'. I am making a conscious effort to speak to them directly, explain choices, share context, or show the why behind editorial decisions and I am seeing how engagement changes."

I loved reading Sudeshna's reflection because, as I said in the comments, that's exactly why I try to always talk about people-centricity rather than audience-centricity. Subtle difference maybe but, if used with intention, quite a big difference.

2. Who in your community is keeping you connected and informed right now? 👉 LINK

I shared my admiration for the work of the Journalism + Design Lab before, so no surprise that they have just released a fantastic framework that maps how people keep their communities informed, authored by 🧞Megan Lucero.

"If we look outside of the narrow frame of 'journalism' we see a civic information ecosystem full of people playing community news roles in diverse and intersectional ways. To strengthen news and information around us we need to embrace this and make it easier for everyone to play a role."

3. What does it really mean to serve a community today? 👉 LINK

The 🧩 JournalismUK team has been killing it since they re-launched the business a couple of weeks ago, and this piece by community editor 🧞Jacob Granger is a great example, exploring different types of communities and how their needs differ.

4. Insights on how change-centric journalism could fix the revenue crisis 👉 LINK

In the latest edition of the Change Journalism newsletter – part of a new project I covered in #32 – 🧞Jazmín Acuña tackles the question in the headline with a fantastic story that shows "how journalism can find greater support when it becomes profoundly useful to people". And I'm not going to tell you more because you should really open the link and read for yourself. A boost of hope is guaranteed.

5. Five surprising findings from my Filipino Gen Z news study 👉 LINK

Interesting study by 🧞Bernice Sibucao that analyses the news habits of young people in the Philippines and how they differ from global trends. The first of the five surprising findings adds an extra layer of nuance on the thoughts about engagement that I shared in the introduction:

"Gen Zs may not always like, comment, or share publicly, but that doesn't mean they're disengaged. Their news habits often unfold in group chats, private messages, and family conversations – spaces invisible to traditional metrics."

6. In times of AI, we must question our dogmas 👉 LINK

"For decades, journalism defined itself through gatekeeping: deciding what matters and in which order. But this role no longer fits how people consume information today. [...] Our function is no longer to guard the gate, but to act as guides on eye level with our audiences. In a world of infinite news, our job is to help navigate complexity, connect perspectives, and create meaning."

Inspiring talk by 🧞Elisabeth Gamperl, product manager for new editorial products at German news agency dpa.

7. Europe’s quiet tech revolt 👉 LINK

Media outlets in France and beyond are building shared infrastructure to regain their independence from big tech platforms – including a coalition of national and local publications that introduced a shared-subscription platform connecting eight publications under a single monthly offer.

(If you are new-ish here, this is what I call a "curveball at number seven": when I decide to use the 7th spot on this list to share something that is a little out there, or only loosely tied to the value proposition of the newsletter, but that I still found very interesting.)

Seven links are not enough? How about two hundred and fifty? 🤓