Meeting user needs pays: How reader-centric content drives revenue

We spoke with Ariel Zirulnick to explore why newsrooms are struggling to meet audience, revenue, and impact goals—and what steps they need to take to turn things around.

As journalists, we like to believe we understand our audiences. We’re often confident that we know what people should care about—sometimes more than they do themselves. Yet, many newsrooms are struggling to adapt to shifting audience habits.

In response, some news organizations are experimenting with “user needs models” to help figure out what audiences actually want and build strategies to meet their demands. We spoke to Ariel Zirulnick, who ran the Membership Puzzle Project and developed a user needs framework at LAist, where she served as Director of News Experimentation until recently.

Ioana Epure: What are we really talking about when we say “user needs”?

Ariel Zirulnick: In most newsrooms the journalism is organized and labeled in a couple different ways: maybe you’d have “beats”, “story types”, and “stages of the funnel” [for audience reve…