Your deepest, darkest user needs and the emotional economics of modern journalism

An ambitious new European platform to distribute public interest journalism, the best paid job in a nonprofit newsroom, welcoming Austria into CEE and 24 active calls.

Welcome

This week on the Media Finance Monitor:

• Your deepest, darkest user needs and the emotional economics of modern journalism

• A new European platform to distribute journalism (and why you should consider joining) (x)

• Is this the best paid job in nonprofit publishing?

• Today we officially welcome Austria into Central and Eastern Europe

• 24 active calls (4 new)

Your deepest, darkest user needs and the emotional economics of modern journalism

Listening to Ariel Zirulnick talk about user needs was a revelatory experience, even after quite a few years in the industry. I think she explained it perfectly last year in this interview with Ioana:

"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 revenues and conversions]. They're all useful in some way – but all of these are rooted in what the newsroom needs. The user needs model creates another taxonomy for a newsroom to work within that is rooted in what the audience members need."

It's so logical and straightforward, yet I know very few newsrooms that have really embraced this mindset when making decisions about content and services.

While I found the user needs model a compelling way of thinking about and organizing editorial work, it focuses primarily on content, and I could never find easy ways to directly connect it to the business of news. That is, until I had a conversation with Lisa MacLeod from FT Strategies at the wonderful 10 Points conference in Sicily last Friday.

The conversation was about the local news and how to best serve audiences, and someone mentioned the user needs model as a helpful framework. But then we moved on to the difficulty of finding a solid business case for local news (I have the magical ability to turn every conversation into a discussion on the business of news, it's like having a special ring that compels people to discuss churn rates at dinner parties) and Lisa made this fascinating point about how some engagement/revenue generation mechanisms are really governed by "dark user needs".

I find this idea captivating, so much so that I immediately started thinking: what are the dark equivalents of user needs, and how do they drive revenues?