A big fear I have in this project is that, when I’m talking about “journalism’s demand problem,” people in the news business may hear something else that’s more familiar to them.
They may hear pontification about “audience.” Or “engagement.” Or “traffic.”
Or “product,” or “user needs,” “listening,” “relevance,” or any of a number of frameworks journalism has adopted over the last decade or two to explain and do something about why people seem less connected to the work we do.
In many cases, these ideas overlap with what I’m trying to understand. I have learned from them, borrowed from them, practiced some of them, and benefited from the people who developed them.
But I do not think they are the same thing as what I’m trying to get at.
When I say journalism has a demand problem, I am not simply saying newsrooms need to know their audiences better. I am not saying we need more pageviews, better newsletters, stronger engagement strategies, more constructive stories, or more sophisticated audience funnels. I am not even saying, exactly, that journalism needs to be more useful — though it does.
I am trying to get at something more basic.
The demand problem asks:
What has to be true in a person’s life, in a community’s civic culture, and in the surrounding social conditions for journalism to feel necessary, trustworthy, usable, and worth seeking out?
That is a different question from: How do we get more people to read what we publish?
It is different from: How do we persuade people to trust us?
It is not: How do we invite the community to help shape our coverage?
It isn’t: How do we report problems in ways that include responses, not just failures?
Those are important questions. They have produced better journalism. They have corrected real blind spots in the profession. They have pushed newsrooms to listen more carefully, reduce harm, expand sourcing, explain complexity, and stop confusing institutional habits with public service.
But most of those reforms still begin with the newsroom’s problem.
How do we reach people?
How do we earn attention?
How do we build loyalty?
How do we sustain the institution?
How do we prove our value?
Again: these are not bad questions. Any newsroom that wants to survive has to ask them. Any newsroom that wants to serve people well has to ask at least some of them.
But the demand question begins somewhere else.
It begins before the story, before the newsletter signup, before any connection with you as a news organization.
Before someone decides whether journalism is for them, whether it is worth their time, whether it connects to anything they are trying to do, whether it helps them solve a problem, understand their place, protect their family, make a decision, participate in public life, or feel less alone in the confusion of civic reality, they went looking for something.
They were moved to seek out information, and they were pretty sure a news organization — yours even — was going to have it.
In the simplest terms: audience development work often asks how journalism can better understand and reach people. Engagement asks how journalism can better involve them.
This demand idea, to me, asks why journalism would matter to someone in the first place — and what would make it possible for them to use it once it reaches them.
That distinction matters because journalism has spent much of its modern crisis trying to improve the supply of news. Better formats. Better beats. Better analytics. Better distribution. Better headlines. Better products. Better events. Better membership programs. Better listening. Better stories.
All of that can help. I honestly want all of that, and I love all my friends across the field doing that work.
But a supply-side fix can only go so far if the deeper problem is that many people do not experience journalism as something they need, can use, or are invited into on terms that make sense in their actual lives.
This is where I think the profession’s language can sometimes trap us.
When we say “audience,” we are usually talking about people in relation to us. They are readers, viewers, listeners, subscribers, members, donors, users, segments, cohorts, personas, or communities we hope to reach.
When we say “engagement,” we are often talking about structured interaction with our work or our institution. We listen. We ask questions. We host events. We invite responses. We gather story ideas. We build relationships. At its best, this can be profound and transformative. But it can also remain a better form of extraction: the community helps the newsroom understand what to make, and the newsroom turns that understanding into journalism.
When we say “traffic,” the relationship becomes even thinner. People become evidence of performance. A click, an open, a conversion, a share, a session, a retention curve.
And when we say “solutions,” we are often talking about the design of the story itself. We are asking journalism to show not only what is broken, but what is being tried, what evidence exists, and what might be learned from responses elsewhere. This, too, is a major improvement over journalism that simply documents failure and walks away.
But demand is not primarily a story problem. It is not primarily a distribution problem. It is not primarily a product problem. It is not primarily a trust problem, at least not in the way journalism usually talks about trust.
Demand is a civic conditions problem.
It is about whether people have enough orientation to know what is going on.
Enough agency to believe their attention can matter.
Enough comprehension to connect public issues to their own lives.
Enough confidence to participate.
Enough social trust to act with others.
Enough time, stability, and emotional bandwidth to take in information that may be complicated, frustrating, or slow to pay off.
Enough pathways from knowing to doing.
Journalism cannot create all of those conditions by itself. But journalism also cannot be healthy without them.
That is why I keep coming back to demand.
Not demand as appetite. Not demand as consumer preference. Not demand as “give the people what they want.” Not demand as a chase for clicks, outrage, convenience, or entertainment.
Demand as civic readiness.
Demand as felt need.
Demand as the presence of real reasons, capacities, habits, relationships, and opportunities that make journalism part of how people navigate public life.
If journalism’s supply problem is, “How do we produce better work?”
Journalism’s demand problem is, “What would make this work matter enough to be sought, used, shared, trusted, and acted upon?”
Those questions belong together. But they are not the same question.
And if we confuse them, we may keep improving the journalism while missing the conditions that would make more people need it.
P.S. I was inspired to think through this after reading a post from Sarah Alvarez. I highly recommend a "subscribe."
News has very few (do we have any?) shared frameworks we can rely on when trying to make principled decisions about the future. Individual newsrooms have guidelines and mission statements, and some tools like a theory of change. But how much do we feel we can really ground ourselves in these? In the absence of strong frameworks, we run the risk of anchoring to anything that feels coherent, like market values, capitalism, or outdated professional norms like objectivity. Worse, lacking any framework to rely on, we run the risk of defaulting to short-term and reactive decision-making about how to navigate even the most existential concerns.
Sarah Alvarez
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