🔶 #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.