If you’ve worked in a newsroom over the past decade, you’ve probably encountered the user needs model.

And if you’ve looked at the Reuters Digital News Report 2026, you know more and more people are getting their news from creators — people who seem to do instinctively what the framework describes.

What are newsrooms missing? And what can we learn from creators?

I’m certainly not the only one who has sat in editorial meetings where someone said: “We need more inspiring content” or “our help me strategy is too weak.” Dmitry Shishkin, who developed the user needs model at the BBC 10 years ago, is very clear on this: The problem doesn’t sit in the missing inspiration; it sits much deeper. 

As he puts it: “Turning an update me story into an inspire me story is impossible if you don’t get the basic components of an inspire me story to start with.” 

In other words: You can’t change a newsroom culture by writing a different brief.

That’s the thing with user needs. They should be central to any sustainable, smart newsroom strategy. But too often they get reduced to content briefings without anything changing in the metrics, the commissioning process, or the editorial culture.

And when we look at the creator world, we see something striking: Creators serve exactly those same needs without ever reading a whitepaper. 

The numbers back this up: According to the DNR 2026, 27% of people globally accessed news from news-focused creators in the past week. And for the first time ever, social media and video have overtaken both TV and newsrooms’ own Web sites as the most widely used source of news globally.

Four needs, four creators who are doing it right

The user needs model describes why people consume news along four drivers: They want to know something, understand something, feel something, or do something. Each driver contains two or three specific needs, from update me and educate me to inspire me, help me, and connect me.

Newsrooms know the axes of this model, but creators live them. 

Let me give you some examples:

Update me: HugoDécrypte

What started as a university student’s YouTube channel is now the most listened-to news source among 15- to 34-year-olds in France, with more Instagram followers than Le Monde. Hugo Travers explains what’s happening in the world: accessible, without dumbing it down. No framework. Just a clear answer to the question: What does my audience need to understand this?

Inspire me: Cleo Abram/Huge If True

Cleo Abram left Vox and Netflix to explain science and technology on YouTube with genuine optimism, now with over 2.8 billion views. Her smart content is playful and creative.  

Help me: The B-Side/Boston Globe

Emily Schario proves with The B-Side how local service journalism can look like. What is happening right now in my city? Where can I go swimming when it’s hot? Which food hot spots do I need to visit?  

Educate me: Sophie Smith Galer 

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist who has built an audience of over one million followers by doing one thing: explaining the world of language. How languages die. Why accents carry bias. What your mother tongue reveals about how you think. She makes her audience part of the investigation, she often invites her community in, and her comment sections reflect that.

The neat categorisation here is intentional but also a little misleading. 

HugoDécrypte doesn’t just update his audience; he inspires, he connects, he helps his audience make sense of events that feel overwhelming. Cleo Abram doesn’t just inspire; she explains, she orients, she gives people something to do with the optimism she generates.

That’s precisely the point: Creators don’t pick a need and serve it. They cover the broad spectrum naturally because their relationship with their audience demands it.

What Dmitry Shiskin thinks is really going wrong

To dig into the gap between framework and reality, I invited Dmitry Shishkin onto the podcast. What he brings is rare: He’s not only the architect of the model but someone who has watched newsrooms apply it — and miss it — for 10 years.

His diagnosis is uncomfortable. The problem isn’t talent but much more what newsrooms measure. 

When you optimise for volume, you land systematically on update me, because that’s what can be produced fastest. His sports user needs model, published earlier this year, shows this empirically: More than 70% of sports content is purely factual, even though the strongest loyalty signals sit with “feel “and “understand” content.

On trust, he’s equally direct: “Trust is nothing but regular usage, you proving on a regular basis that your content is worth somebody’s time. You can’t build it immediately. There is no such thing as trust by default.” 

And on what needs to change structurally: “You can’t change something that you don’t measure. Audit your output, open your eyes, and acknowledge the truth of what exactly you’re outputting.”

His parting thought on creators is the one I keep coming back to: “The best creators are doing one thing, but very, very well. And if you want to work with them, you either bring them in or you train people internally, but you don’t do it tokenistically. You do it in a way that will actually make sense to young people.”

You’ll find the whole episode here.

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