🔶 News Alchemists #54: "What does ‘audience value’ mean to local news professionals?"

Hello, and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!

There's a lot I wanted to say in this introduction, but life happens – in this case in the shape of a nasty bug that pretty much knocked me out for three days 🤧

I'm still playing catch-up with work, so let's keep it short here and move straight to the links.

See you next week 👋

1. What does ‘audience value’ mean to local news professionals? 👉 LINK

During his fellowship at Stanford, 🧞Eric Ulken is exploring the question of "How can we grow the value of local news to audiences?"

He started his research by trying to understand if people in journalism even agree on what that 'value' is, running an informal 8-question survey of local news professionals in the US. (With questions such as "How do you define audience value?" and "What stands in the way of delivering greater value to audiences in your organization?") The results might not be very surprising but they reveal something that should make us think:

What emerged is a snapshot of an industry that is intellectually aligned on its broader civic mission but less well equipped to deliver concrete value to audiences.

2. From user needs to digital innovation: 5 lessons from leading Danish publishers 👉 LINK

I know you woke up this morning with only one question in mind: "I wonder what makes publishers in Denmark so successful? 🤔" It looks like these takeaways from a recent WAN-IFRA study tour were put together just for you.

Jokes aside, this could be the outline of a good roadmap:

1. Process over platforms: Why collaboration unlocks transformation
2. Strategic constraint: How limits can drive focus and engagement
3. Building trust through transparency and quality
4. Intimacy at scale: Making journalism personal and participatory
5. Why transformation requires patience and purpose

With insights from 🧩 Zetland, 🧩 Berlingske, and 🧩 JP/Politikens Hus.

3. Knowledge capital in newsrooms: brand, audience and talent in the AI-mediated era 👉 LINK

This paper by Brazilian journalist and editor 🧞Carla Miranda complements very well the insights from the previous link. In it, Carla argues that the resilience of journalism increasingly depends on:

• Brand (identity, trust, and differentiation)
• Audience (loyalty, insight, and co‑creation)
• Talent (knowledge, creativity, and culture)
• Institutional knowledge (systems, processes, and shared expertise)

These are forms of knowledge capital: the accumulated value embedded in people, relationships, and systems. In other sectors, these assets are tracked, nurtured, and leveraged for competitive advantage. In news, they’re often undervalued or left invisible.

(Seriously, try to map these four assets against the five takeaways from Danish newsrooms. The parallels are fascinating.)

4. Mexican digital outlets launch alliance to defend local journalism, rebuild audience trust 👉 LINK

17 independent media outlets from across Mexico are joining forces to combat the insecurity faced by the press in their country, as well as to promote the sustainability of local journalism.

I have my reservations about campaigns designed to "raise awareness among audiences about the importance of local journalism" (check the first link in #36 for reference) – but I admire this initiative, Territorial, nonetheless: 17 teams coming together to support each other, amplify each other's voices, and ultimately serve their combined audiences better.

5. Why The Mill will be republishing ‘MEN Premium journalism’ 👉 LINK

Read the headline and you might think this is another example of collaboration between media outlets, The Mill and the Manchester Evening News (MEN)... Nop. It's a self-described "act of petty protest", encapsulating an interesting fracture between (oversimplification alert) old and new ways of doing journalism – and different ways of understanding the responsibility to be transparent with the public about how the journalism itself is made.

Is it fair for a legacy newspaper to publish a piece produced through a publicly-funded scheme, put it behind a paywall, and market it as "premium article created exclusively for our subscribers"?

Is it fair for a digital media startup operating in the same local market to call out this behaviour as unfair and to republish the full paywalled article for free?

Prime material for reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole. Who do you think is ""the asshole"" in this story? 👀

6. In a story commons, the process is the purpose 👉 LINK

One of a series of reflections published by The People's Newsroom here in the UK (curated by OG news alchemist 🧞Shirish Kulkarni) around the idea of a 'story commons', defined as "processes for sharing stories that are highly collective, democratic and accountable, supporting communities to imagine and build towards transformed futures."

This piece appears to me to be very relevant for the transition phase (or should I say 'identity crisis'?) that our journalism – both as a profession and as a product – is going through:

As organisations, value is assigned solely to outputs – so for those of us in the business of telling stories, our worth might be judged on an article, a theatre production or a piece of music. But those final artefacts are not the whole story [...] They are just one moment in the wider ‘story of the story’, which includes the processes and relationships which inspired and generated the story, the physical, mental and emotional connections developed during the production of the story, and the change the story will make once it goes out into the world. [...] Central to that is recognising that the process is a purpose. If we can inspire, build and support transformative and lasting kinds of relationships through our work, surely that is more valuable than a transient or ephemeral ‘object’, such as a single headline?

7. Journalism lost its culture of sharing. Here’s how we rebuild it. 👉 LINK

If it wasn't clear from the choice of some of the links in this email (or from those in the 53 previous editions for that matter) I'm a big proponent of radical openness, transparency and collaboration as powerful tools that in our industry we consistently underestimate and underuse.

No surprise then that I wanted to share this great piece where 🧞Scott Klein and 🧞Ben Welsh not only lament the decline of a "show your work" culture that was thriving just a decade ago among technical teams in journalism; they also provide useful recommendations for individuals, newsrooms, and the industry as a whole, to rebuild that culture of sharing together.

And the most clicked link from the previous edition is... 🥁

Well, there was only one 😅

Next Gen News 2 (NGN2) - Future of News and Young Audiences

Exploring the future of news consumption and production for Gen Z and Gen Alpha

Next Gen News 2

⇲ The LinkedIn Corner

Where usually I highlight LinkedIn posts by my readers that, for different reasons, may not 'qualify' to the 7-links league but are still interesting to share.

This week I have nothing for you though, because [nasty bug]. But we can spin this as an opportunity since I've been wanting to ask you anyways:

Have you posted anything worth sharing with other NA readers? Send it over and I will consider including it in next week's newsletter! 💌

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