Who doesn’t love an anniversary? We recently celebrated 10 years since newsrooms first started talking about the concept of user needs.

User what? I know from my conversations with INMA members that this is an idea still unfamiliar to many editorial teams, so here is a bit of background from Dmitry Shishkin, who was working for the British Broadcasting Corporationat the time and popularised the concept.

“In May 2016, the BBC World Service’s audience research team set out to do something deceptively simple: categorise content by why audiences consumed it, not what it was about,” Shishkin writes. 

In other words, it meant acknowledging the people who come to our many news products have many needs — some want to be updated on the latest news, some want to gain perspective on current events, and some simply want to be entertained or educated or inspired. Indeed, often the same person has many different needs.

Or, as Santanu Chakrabarti, who co-led the original research said: “What are you asking a journalist to do? You’re asking them to momentarily put themselves in the shoes of another human being and say, what need is this fulfilling for them?”

The data they saw surprised the BBC team. 

“When that categorisation was mapped against performance data, an uncomfortable finding emerged,” Shishkin said. “For newsroom after newsroom, roughly 70% of output fell into a single need — “update me” — and was responsible for only a fraction of user traffic. The editorial machine was running at full speed and mostly in one direction.”

If you work in the news business, you know that this is true. Our Web sites and apps, even today, are flooded with updates of news stories — even when most of us in newsrooms know, from looking at the data, we are lucky if most of our readers come to us even once a day. And when they come, they often consume a wide range of content.

Why do we keep doing this? 

“The data was unequivocal. The problem was the incentive structures. Journalists are rewarded for publishing. Volume is visible. Need fulfilment is not,” Shishkin points out.

“The newsrooms that made it work didn’t rely on individual discipline. They changed the infrastructure, commissioning, and newsgathering.”

Getting more data has not solved this problem, he said: “More signals, more proxies, more distance between measurement and meaning. Closing that gap requires two things working together: cleaner, governed data environments where the user needs taxonomy is the organising principle, and research as the lens that tells you what the data actually means.”

The next frontier is “smarter data, interpreted through a deeper understanding of audiences — and acted on, at scale, by AI systems that are only as good as the foundations beneath them.” 

Looking ahead, the solution lies in providing content in different formats that are related to users’ needs, he said. “If you cannot operationalise multimodality properly, you will never deliver on those needs consistently.”

For example, a video could be a two-minute vertical explainer for TikTok or a 45-minute interview for YouTube — each serving entirely different needs in entirely different contexts. A 150-word news brief and a 2,000-word investigation are both text. Yet, if you think of them both simply as “text,” you are missing opportunities to understand the data better.

As Andy Jones, who co-led the original research, said: “Instead of asking broad questions like, ‘Should we do more video?’ or ‘Does long-form work?’, you can ask many more useful ones: Which formats work best for which user needs, on which topics, for which audiences, in which moments?”

“The real power emerges when you connect specific content treatments to the variables that actually shape consumption: the user need at the centre, the subtopic, the distribution channel, the time of day, the audience segment,” Shishkin said. “That is when commissioning becomes precise. That is when content cohort optimisation actually happens.” 

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Banner art: Adobe stock image By InfiniteFlow.

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