On February 24, 2022, Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine. In Cardiff, a group of undergraduates — the kind of young audience who, by every industry metric, had drifted away from traditional news — did something unexpected: They went looking for news and kept going back.

That moment became the context for a study by psychologist Ellen O’Donoghue of Cardiff University, David Caswell of BBC News Labs, and others, which has just been published in Nature’s Scientific Reports. 

The findings matter to publishers redefining their content strategy amid the rise of AI and creators, as well as shrinking reach.

“User needs” in the newsrooms

In the past two decades, as the news media paradigm shifted towards audience-centricity, many publishers experimented with new ways to adapt their journalism to audience needs and business priorities.

They operationalised the same underlying idea under different names, depending on which discipline got there first. Since the 1940s, communication researchers talked about media uses and gratifications, marketers — consumer needs and wants, product designers — user needs. Executives often call the same thing jobs-to-be-done. 

Since 2016, the concept saw a resurgence in a simplified, newsroom-ready form. Dmitry Shishkin, then an editor at BBC World Service, polished and popularised an internal taxonomy of user needs: e.g., update me, educate me, give me perspective, inspire me, divert me, connect me. This taxonomy inspired editors, software vendors, and consultants across the world for the past decade.

The concept is influential. FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA’s 2026 Future Newsrooms Study, surveying 448 newsrooms across 86 countries, found 21% now begin commissioning with a defined user need or specific audience group in mind.

Where the idea has taken hold, it’s visibly reshaping coverage: The newsrooms are deliberately pulling investment away from daily breaking news and toward background reporting and explainers.

The Cardiff-BBC study is, according to the authors, the first attempt to test that practitioners’ framework independently and from the bottom up, with data rather than intuition.

When reporting the study results, I will use Dmitry Shishkin’s popular labels for the needs to make comparisons easier rather than the labels used by the academics.

The reality check

Researchers wrote 24 statements capturing every plausible motivation for reading news – from “keep me up-to-date” to “lift my mood” to “make me feel connected to other people” — and asked young adults to rate how well each described them. 

A statistical technique called factor analysis then grouped the responses by which items tended to rise and fall together. Three factors emerged from the data on their own: “update me,” “give me perspective,” and a new need: “help me manage my emotions” (positive or negative). 

Notably, some needs from the BBC’s original framework — “inspire me,” “divert me,” and some others — collapsed into just these three underlying drives, suggesting the practitioners’ taxonomy is more granular than the psychology actually supports.

Surprisingly, “connect me” didn’t survive the factor analysis at all! Statements such as “make me feel connected to other people” or “give me something to talk about with other people” didn’t emerge as a distinct driver. 

(The researchers’ explanation: Younger audiences likely meet that need through social media rather than news itself.)

When the researchers tested which of the three factors best predicted how often someone actually consumed news, only “update me” and “give me perspective” were significant. “Help me manage my emotions” did not. 

And when all three factors were pitted against each other, “update me” alone remained the strongest, independent predictor.

The Cardiff-BBC study was limited to 312 undergraduates, but it’s not the only evidence reminding us that news demand is mostly driven by people’s need to stay current.

Additional evidence

In 2024, Oxford’s Reuters Institute surveyed tens of thousands across 47 markets and found “update me” was the single most important need cited globally (72%), ahead of every other motivation tested (“educate me” was second at 67%).

Online traffic data tells the same story. Across 317 news brands benchmarking with INMA, spikes in demand during big news events, such as the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war or the U.S. elections, are visible globally.

Mastery of breaking news and live coverage remains one of the few reliably proven ways to win a place in a reader’s repertoires — the set of news brands any one person regularly turns to. 

For example, in the U.S. about half of news consumers use five or more sources, and the most valuable heavy users tend to have larger repertoires.

The moment people are most likely to add a new source is during a major, high-uncertainty news event when people alter daily routines and look for more sources. 

When the question “what happened?” is answered, the “why?” and “so what?” raise to prominence. 

When the Cardiff and BBC researchers looked specifically at how people followed the Ukraine invasion in the weeks after it began, the driver flipped: “Update me” was replaced by “give me perspective.”

Reuters Institute’s 2024 data showed the same tension: “Update me” scored highest on both importance and how well the media already delivers it, but the largest unmet need — where audiences want more than they’re getting — was “give me perspective.”

Motivations to use vs. motivations to pay

In general, “Why do people consume news?” and “Why do people pay for it?” are not the same question, and the evidence for each comes from different places.

A 2025 study tied stated motivations directly to actual subscription transactions across two large U.S. surveys. The six factors that predicted paying — led by supporting journalism, then journalism quality, then paywall friction — had little overlap with consumption-style “user needs” language. 

Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report confirmed it at a larger scale: The top reasons payers give for subscribing are getting useful content they can’t access elsewhere and supporting journalism because it matters to society. Neither maps onto “update me.” 

News publishers’ internal data — for example, from clients of Highberg or Smartocto — often shows the same split behaviourally: “Update me” content consistently dominates supply and pulls in the most traffic but converts to subscription at a lower rate than less frequently published content serving needs such as “give me perspective.”

Takeaways

The lesson here isn’t to choose between breaking news and explainers. Both formats serve different jobs. Breaking news and live coverage is the proven front door into a reader’s repertoire. Understanding is what deepens engagement and eventually converts. 

Separately, the fact that news lost its grip on social connectedness is a matter of concern but not a reason to give it up. Social platforms are increasingly broadcasters, not social spaces, perhaps leaving that role up for grabs.

Motivation to stay current does not equal motivation to pay. Perceived utility and distinctiveness of your journalism, feelings of moral duty to support your mission, and convenience are the top drivers.

Interested in newsroom innovations? Join INMA’s Sonali Verma discussing “connect me” user need applications at the Financial Times with Hannah Sarney on July 29.

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

Banner art: Adobe Stock by Terovesalainen.

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