Field Note 05: The Wrong Specification

What readers want has never really counted in digital journalism. I say counted because measurement started 30 years ago with server logs and page views. Around the same time, in the mid 1990s, the “ad impression” came out of print. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) imported the circulation currency of newspapers and broadcast wholesale. By 2000, when Google launched AdWords, clicks had monetary value. The industry has chased views, dwell-time, and clicks ever since, leaving human needs unmeasured.

Those numbers came from selling an audience to an advertiser. They are precise about what the industry takes from a reader and silent on what it gives back. They record that a piece was opened, never why, or what in it mattered. The result is journalism that is accurate, well-sourced, and clearly written, but built to the wrong specification: a long read for someone who needed an update, or a push notification for someone who needed silence.  To count what we give rather than what we take, we have to know what the reader came for. It is a question about the reader, not the output, and it has three parts. Most newsrooms can answer one, perhaps two.

Values

Values come first. Not preferences, which are surface level, but the orientations underneath. A commitment to community or concern about the environment holds across topics and years. At a regional media group in Germany, we mapped readers by values using the SINUS Milieus framework. The demographic lines came apart. A 32-year-old in a city sat closer to a 60-year-old of the same milieu in a village half an hour away than to someone the same age in the next building with the same income. Demographics describe the data of a life. Values describe what a life is being used for.

Interests

Values hold still over time, which is also their limit. They will not explain why a reader who has never opened a health story spends this week reading about oncology. The reader’s values have not moved; what has moved are the issues that have newly opened. A diagnosis does not add a topic to a list the way a hobby does, and neither does a pregnancy — each puts the reader on a road not travelled yesterday. Interests open, often overnight, and close again once the issue resolves.

Mindset and Stage

The third dimension is mindset or situational stage. A newly opened interest starts the reader often at the beginning of that road, not somewhere along it. Behaviour-change research offers, for example, a continuum for health-related concerns, which I describe here as: unaware, aware, worried without yet a name for it, decided to act, going through it, living with it, out the other side. A reader stands in different places on different subjects at the same hour. Years along on climate, not yet aware of the health question that will matter more. Values can be measured directly because a reader can be asked. Interests and stage are harder to see. By the time a behaviour shows up (a share, a like, a return visit), it is a record of what was taken, not a signal freely given. It tells you attention moved. It does not tell you why, or where on the continuum the reader stood when it did. These proxies are the best most newsrooms have today, and they are worth using, but they inherit the same limitation as the page view: precise about the action, silent on the need behind it. Building a genuine signal for interest and readiness, something closer to what values already have in tools like SINUS, is the harder, unfinished part of this work.

Get the values right but the stage of interest wrong, and the journalism does not reach its potential. Offer a reader who has not yet named the worry a list of ten things to do about a condition that cannot yet be said out loud, and the story gets closed rather than read. What was needed at that point on the continuum was context without a demand, and information without pressure. The facts, the expertise, and the research are often already in the newsroom. It takes a few more questions in the interview, decided at the planning stage, then a different assembly: different framing, different entry point, different need. A version for the reader who has not named it yet, a version for the reader who has decided to act.

What We Can’t Measure Yet

That solves supply. It does not solve delivery. Producing both versions is a planning decision. Knowing which reader should receive which version is still the harder, unmeasured question. It is the same gap the proxies above leave open. That gap is not a reason to wait. A newsroom that has both versions ready and routes them by imperfect signal (a share, a return visit, an editor’s judgement) is still closer to the reader than one that had only ever written the single, average version in the first place. The measurement problem is real. It is not an excuse to keep producing for nobody in particular while it gets solved.

Why This Is Worth Paying For

Why would anyone want to pay for this? Under advertising, the answer could be deferred because the attention was the product and the reader was the inventory. Under subscription, there is nothing else to sell. The reader has to be given something of value, which means somebody has to know what brought that reader there, and why. A newsroom does not need to solve that measurement problem before it starts building the versions the reader will eventually need.

Until next time,

Dietmar