Over the past five years, we have created more than 150 bespoke reports for newsrooms and other media-centric publishers. These reports provide a snapshot of what’s being published, what’s resonating with audiences, and what isn’t.

Some of these reports are for international titles with multiple offices, countless personnel, and big budgets. Others are for hyper-local publishers, operating at a grassroots level and with minimal staff. Then there have been non-profits, content marketing companies, and sports media brands. They’re located across all continents (though not, it should be noted, Antarctica).

They are, in short, diverse in their purpose, place, and people.

Each of these reports are interesting in their own right, as they should be: laden with insights editors can ponder and do something about.

But in creating these reports, we started noticing something really interesting. The fact is that, although reports are generated with eyes focused only on company performance and with no insight of what’s happening in other publishing houses, there are certain things we see time and time again.

It’s this: There is simply too much fact-driven content being published.

And, more than that, there is too much fact-driven content being published, and readers simply aren’t reading it.

The findings

The original trigger was BBC Worldwide.

It’s a rhythmically pleasing soundbite: 70% of content produced at BBC Worldwide generated only 7% of article reads. This imbalance not only launched but super-charged the user needs framework — a system designed to ensure planning, writing, and publishing is audience-centric to the core.

At smartocto, where we further developed and refined this model into what we call user needs 2.0, our findings showed a very similar story. Across all markets and publishers, 70% of content brings in just 10% of reach — and the dominant user need within that 70% was categorised as the fact-based “update me.”

Supplementary evidence: Omroep West

A baseline report for Dutch media company Omroep West (June 2025) showed 61% of its published articles were what we would class as “update me.” Following this baseline report, the organisation managed to address the imbalance across the various user needs, resulting in the lowering of “update me” articles to 55% of the total output post-report.

This 6% reduction not only meant more space for different editorial approaches, but also rewarded the team with a 14% increase in pageviews across the site — a 4% increase in average attention time.

Is it just news media?

In short. No.

Over the past few months, we’ve been analysing data for sports publications and sections as we prepare to roll out user needs support for sports publishers. A large-scale analysis of sports-centric publications revealed a very similar story about the unbalance of output.

Here, 75% of published content was deemed “fact-driven.” Again, this might not be significant were it not for the companion finding: Article reads were significantly higher for other kinds of content published.

The explanation

News is fundamentally about providing updates, but the traditional approach to delivery must be urgently reconsidered. Just as educational theory has evolved, so too have audience needs, which have changed irreversibly.

People are no longer primarily seeking mere facts, which can often be absorbed as if by osmosis, from push notifications and news aggregators (Apple News, Google Discover, etc.).

A publisher’s true value now resides in its unique brand definition and the services it offers. This value is delivered by providing context, clarity, and sometimes even a lighter touch to breaking news, going deeper and revealing insights that a short social media update cannot convey.

In all the cases above, where revised attention was given to the entire editorial process — particularly when long-held practices were interrogated — the rewards were overwhelmingly positive.

So why is there still so much fact-based content being published? Three key reasons are:

1. It’s hardwired into the profession: to report the new is to report facts.
2. The proof may not be available or visible to those working at the sharp end.
3. It may be unclear what the alternative or course of action is.

The solution (and opportunity)

Rutger Verhoeven, smartocto’s CMO and a veteran of public service newsrooms in the Netherlands, shares his suggestions on moving forward:

• Create a list of the minimum characteristics that an “update me” article should have. Be strict. If an intended article doesn’t meet this list of requirements, don’t publish it. For example: Never use stock photography.

• Use a checklist or harness a tool specifically designed for the purpose of helping decide when to write an “update me” article and when not to. Our decision matrix is part of the smartocto toolkit, designed for this exact purpose. Use it.

• Think about follow-up strategies to keep your audience engaged and on topic, which is better than producing orphans. Sometimes you’ll want to publish breaking news, but, as part of this process, you should always think about how to follow that bulletin up later with content answering unspoken questions. You might want to provide context, additional perspectives, or practical guidance or help. Factor all of these things into the planning.

• Pay attention to notifications (if your analytics tool offers them). Real-time feedback will guide you republish, rewrite, or further edit an article, all of which should help improve performance and engagement. This is what Finnish publisher, Turun Sanomat, did.

• Utilise editorial analytics reporting. Watch how your stories perform once published. Not only will this help you replicate successful articles, but it will help you decide where not to put your resources as well.

• Always be learning. There are always new tools, insights, and tricks to deploy. We run Labs where we train newsrooms how to do all of this, including ways to monitor, optimise, and sometimes reduce the amount of purely fact-based articles leaving the editorial suite.

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