🔶 News Alchemists #52: "Better engagement is about better habits, not more creative ideas."
Welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!
Hard to believe that one month is almost gone already in 2026, but here we are: just a few more days and the longest month of the year will be over. (Is it just me thinking that January always feels veeery long?)
This means that this edition is the last one in which I allow myself to include a couple of reflections on 2025 and predictions for 2026. Pinky promise.
I'm really pleased with today's seven links, as they cover many of the popular topics that we explore together in this newsletter – audience engagement (link ❶), trust and what it means (❷), impact (❸), and entrepreneurship (❺) – as well as a couple of links on beautiful visual journalism (❻ and ❼) and the profile of a news organisation that reports "from the center of the world" (❹).
I hope you like them too.
Not only they are great links, they also contribute to reaching quite a milestone...
That's right: 300 links! 303, to be precise.
A number that I thought was worth celebrating by giving all those beautiful links a more appropriate home: a dedicated page on the News Alchemists website, accessible only to you, dear readers 🎁
Mattia Peretti
And talking about new webpages: Keep reading after the seven links if you're interested in advertising your products, services, events, or expertise in this newsletter.
It's links time 📚 See you next week!
P.S.: The idea about recycling non-selected Perugia proposals that I put forward last week did not gain much traction. Some readers loved it and described it as a "bold ask" and a "potentially very powerful idea". But only three proposals were submitted through the form. I guess the time is not ripe yet for the News Alchemists Festival? It was worth a try!
1. Better engagement is about better habits, not more creative ideas. 👉 LINK
Some excellent reflections on engagement by 🧞Francesca Dumas:
- Engagement isn’t a one-off campaign. It’s a habit.
- Low pressure beats high creativity (every time).
- Being asked matters more than being published.
- First-party data grows when trust is visible.
- Journalists don’t need more work. They need better loops.
Which of these can have the most positive impact on the way you engage your audiences this year?
2. Everyone studies trust, everyone measures it — but are we actually talking about the same thing? 👉 LINK
Trust is one of our industry's favourite concepts. But do we even know what we mean with it? 🧞Mark Boukes and colleagues reviewed 623 empirical studies on news media trust and related concepts, and... I'll let you guess what they found.
(Check back on edition #16 for more on the topic of trust.)
3. Impact as a value metric 👉 LINK
The article I shared last week on how The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracks impact was very popular, so let's dive deeper into the topic.
This short section of 🧞Jazmín Acuña's Change-Centric Journalism Framework (which I will never tire of sharing) presents some examples of people and organisations who have worked on developing ways to understand how impact can be used to measure the value of journalism.
Read also the following section to learn why "impact alone is not enough".
4. ‘Forest journalists’ are reimagining how stories from the Amazon are told 👉 LINK
Beautiful story on the LatAm Journalism Review about 🧩 Sumaúma, a media organisation that aims "to amplify the voices of the Amazon region and “Amazonize” the world, especially since the Amazon has been, for decades, a tough place for local voices to emerge with truly local stories that avoid cliches and stereotypes."
5. Small acts take center stage 👉 LINK
The last Nieman Lab Prediction to make it into this newsletter (at least until next year) is by 🧞P. Kim Bui. And it might be the prediction I most self-identified with since... ever, I guess.
What if we stop trying to get bigger? Over the course of the last year and change as a consultant, I’ve worked with news organizations that are launching, or struggling to redefine what “growth” means to them. [...] These are single projects, maybe not even big enough to be full organizations, that seek to serve a single audience in a single way. But if they do a good enough job, then attention means more support and more prominence. [...] Sometimes, all you need is what is just enough to make a fair wage and to support the work. This means, perhaps, the small acts whose ambitions are targeted are going to learn to have to say no. Or, even better, funders and service organizations learn to respect journalists for what their ambition is, not our collective ambition for them. Let’s find ways to have them grow at the pace they dictate.
6. Charting myths, debt and monkey farms: How Kontinentalist is reimagining data journalism in Asia 👉 LINK
🧩 Kontinentalist is a Singapore-based storytelling startup that does things differently: the average piece can take two to three months of production and every story goes through a collaborative design sprint. They look at qualitative impact over ad revenue and arbitrary readership figures. In the words of co-founder 🧞Pei Ying Loh: “The metrics we do care about is: if people do read it, what do they do about it?”
If you ask me, we can learn a lot from them. Also, the design is beauuuuutiful.
7. Can an AI make a data-driven, visual story? 👉 LINK
This story is about AI. The fact that it is about AI is completely irrelevant for my choice of including it in this newsletter. 🧩 The Pudding is amazing, that's the reason. Look at people doing cool journalism work like this and tell me we can't be hopeful. Love it.
And the most clicked link from the previous edition is... 🥁
Jacob Granger
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Mattia Peretti
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⇲ The LinkedIn Corner
I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn – you know that already. That's not always a good thing, but it helps me stay up-to-date with innovative projects, interesting ideas, and valuable research.
And many of the cool posts I come across are by you – the readers of this newsletter!
So here's a new experiment: a pop-up section of this email where I highlight your posts that, for different reasons, may not 'qualify' for the 7-links league, but are still interesting to share. This week...
👀 Federica is looking for reading recommendations on the topic of "power (empowering, disempowering) and how much power ≠ control." Do you have any recommendations for her?
📝 Gerson wrote an article for JournalismUK to summarise, in English, the findings of the great report on audience engagement that he wrote last Autumn, and that I featured in #40 – (originally published in Dutch).
✊ Sudeshna launched IranDraft, a diasporic Persian-language publication redefining what journalism and news analysis can and should mean for communities in exile.
What do you think of the LinkedIn Corner? Should we keep it as a recurring section?
Use the thumbs-up or thumbs-down below to let me know what you think.
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