A New Journalism

In 1973 Tom Wolfe, the American journalist turned novelist, published a collection of writing that he dubbed The New Journalism. It was a tribute to a kind of journalism that was expansive, descriptive, challenging and bold in its ambition. Its aim, declared Wolfe, was nothing less than “dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre”.

I bought the book in 1990 and, as a teenager with an ill-formed ambition to become a journalist, lapped it up. The novelistic style that “put you in the room” where the events were taking place seemed something to which to aspire. It was more vivid and more engaging than the straightforward typewriter-driven news that was what most newspapers still produced at that time. No adjectives were left unused; SEO-optimised headlines were just a shimmer on the horizon. This was journalism as a swashbuckling and participatory calling.

Some of its influences remain in newsrooms to this day. Editors still send pieces back demanding more “colour”; every political reporter – in Britain, at least – will have described the dishes of a banquet accompanying an international summit; and a convincing “narrative” is regarded as a bare minimum of a long story.

Wolfe and his collaborator EW Johnson collected 23 exemplary pieces for their book. You will be unsurprised to learn that 21 of them were by white American men, including two apiece by Hunter S Thompson and, of course, Wolfe himself. Two women represented the rest of the world.

Happily the world has moved on, albeit slowly, since 1973 in terms of diversity in newsrooms. But, I would argue, journalism hasn’t.

It is delivered in different mediums, of course, but fundamentally the output is the same as it was 50 years ago. News stories written in inverted pyramids, with the occasional drop intro, analysis pieces, interviews, op-eds and features in the style beloved by Wolfe remain the building blocks of today’s publications. As practised by journalists, it hasn’t really adapted to the new platforms where it is now available, nor responded to our greater knowledge of what readers really want.

I believe that we need a new journalism for the second half of the 2020s and beyond.

The reasons are abundantly clear. The business models of traditional journalism outlets are incredibly challenged. The print model was remarkably simple and lucrative. Find a geographic or interest-based market that advertisers wanted to reach; offer them an engaging product with a read-me front page; print money.

Of course, it was slightly more complicated than that, but now publishers have seen their advertising clients disappear to digital platforms – which, bluntly, do a better job of targeting consumers – and their readers run off to the same platforms, which have perfected the art of offering addictive media consumption.

In the past couple of years, as the covid-era interest in news and state support in the form of public information advertising have waned, the situation has become perilous. While publishers are fighting gamely to keep up their digital traffic and subs numbers, the print end days are approaching – and taking profitability along with them.

A game my business partner and I sometimes play with our consulting clients is to ask them to name the legacy publishers in their market who they know to be profitable. If they can come up with more than two, things are looking quite rosy. Self-evidently, in the long term this is an alarming state of affairs.

It’s also possible that the news media is only at the start of its disruption. I took a course at the Judge Business School in Cambridge a couple of years ago and was struck by how the professors there regarded the media as remarkably undisrupted. “Look at TV news bulletins, look at newspapers – they are the same as they were 30 years ago,” they said, comparing us with the havoc wrought on the music industry, airlines and car manufacturing to name but three.

Perhaps that disruptive moment is coming now with the appearance of generative AI on the scene.

Those who make a living by predicting the future are not optimistic about news publishing. Speaking at a recent conference in Brussels organised by Twipe, the digital publishing company, Natali Helberger, a professor of law and digital technology at the University of Amsterdam, explained the scenario planning work she has done in connection to the news media.

In short, she said it was likely, though not inevitable, that in 20 years’ time news publishers would be reduced to being content providers for tech platforms who will own the customer relationship and almost all distribution channels. In potentially good news for reporters, if not their bosses, she also saw the possibility of publishers being disintermediated in the relationship with the tech giants by their own staff. Why go through a publisher if you can employ, or pay, a journalist directly? Few in the audience demurred at this possibility, even if they didn’t like the sound of it.

While the business side is clearly incredibly challenged, I believe that this is not just an issue for “state” but for “church” too. Building a new journalism is not just about creating sustainable business models, it is about changing the very essence of what we as journalists do. Being brutal, the content we are producing today is not engaging people – and especially not young people.

I should point out at this time that I’m addressing this piece towards legacy news publishers. There is a reason they are called “legacy” by many people, including some who work for them. This is a sad thing because there remains a lot of trust and authority in these organisations, not to mention many outstanding journalists. I want them to be part of the news future.

I have wondered whether my thinking is too negative. Am I being too pessimistic about the future of journalism and publishers in particular? But then I learnt about the Stockdale paradox, which holds that it is possible both to confront harsh realities and also to remain optimistic about one’s ability to overcome whatever challenges are thrown at you. In that spirit, I will continue.

Why do we need a new journalism?

People aren’t into journalism as much as we are

In the corner of your newsroom is a person or group of people who know the truth about your journalism. They could be called an audience development editor, or maybe a content strategist, or, if you’re really well resourced, they are the data science team. The reporters and editors tend not to talk to them enough – which, believe me, is an enduring subject of frustration among those teams. But they know better than anyone what really works and does not work about your output.

They know that your star columnist isn’t quite as starry as he or she thinks in the eyes of readers, who don’t read their columns in large numbers. In fact, they barely read them at all. They’ll tell you that although you might produce dozens of stories a day on a big event like an election or a natural disaster, more than 95% of readers will only read one of them.

At a larger and more ominous scale, they will also tell you that it’s surprising how little of your content people read every day, or indeed every month. If you don’t have a hard paywall, my guess is that your typical reader comes once a month and reads one article.

Sure, you might say if you work for a subscription-based outlet, they are prospects – a number of them will convert. And besides we get ad revenue from them.

I’d say: maybe, but ask how much your actual subscribers are reading. You will be surprised at how few articles it is per visit, per day (remember that most people will visit only once), per week and month. I’ve talked to publishers around the world and the most engaged subscribers – the real super-fans – will read an average of about 12 articles a day in two or three visits. But most subscribers will read less than five.

There will of course be some who download e-papers or newspaper-like tablet editions and read them like newspapers, but – and there is no way of saying this diplomatically – they are old and will die in the next 10-15 years.

If that feels grim, let’s consider the “zombie” subscribers that beset every subscription-based publisher. These are the people who never visit the product they’ve paid for. I’ve done this myself: you sign up for an exciting new publication, ready to read it if not every day then a couple of times a week and then … well, you don’t. And when subscription renewal time comes around, you get a polite reminder to cancel if you want to, but life intervenes and lo, you’re signed up for another year of not reading.

I write this as someone who used to read newspapers for a living. A large portion of my day as a working journalist was spent reading other people’s journalism. Every morning I would sit down with all the UK papers and read them cover to cover. It would take hours but woe betide me if I missed a story. I used to work with a news editor who would take pride in not only reading everything but in remembering where stories were placed. You would go to him with a story you thought would fly and he’d say: “That was a nib in the Telegraph last Wednesday, page 15.”

So I read newspaper after newspaper, followed by website after website, all day long.

Of course, no actual reader is this dedicated to what we produce. They scan and skim and graze. In fact, since I stopped being a working journalist my news consumption has changed dramatically. I flip through a couple of news apps and read two or three stories. Then I’ll listen to a variety of podcasts on my way to work and that’s me done.

One thing I definitely do not do is sit in front of a laptop constantly refreshing news sites, looking for “fresh” stories. If there’s news I really need to know about, it’ll come to me. Usually through a push notification.

Bear in mind that I do this as someone who is really interested in news and who considers himself pretty well informed. I bet I am at the far right-hand side of the Bell curve of news consumers. Others read and listen to far, far less than me.

In short, I believe every newsroom should put up a big sign saying: “You are not your readers.” We need to remember that most consumers are not as obsessed with the news as we are and that we have many fewer opportunities to offer them something valuable than we acknowledge. If we do this, it would be a great start to forging a new journalism.

We’re still doing print journalism in a digital world

The first thing every editor of a print newspaper or section used to think every day or week was: “Have I got enough to fill?” Once that fear was taken care of then you could start making the end product better.

This explains a lot about how we did journalism. It was measured by volume, not quality. When a big story broke – say a terrorist attack on a capital city – an editor would likely think, “Right, that’s a spread” or “That’s two spreads” before he or she even thought for a second about what went into them. They’d committed to four or five stories of unknown content right away. And of course there’s always enough content – there has to be.

Where am I going with this? The problem is that many still adopt this mindset when the environment has changed completely. We continue to act like the bigger the story the bigger the number of articles we need to write on it.

But this does not recognise that in a digital landscape, every story needs to compete on its own against the rest of the internet.

The idea of a package is redundant. As I noted earlier, most people – more than 90% – will read only one story on any given subject each day. So why offer them five, or more? When the Queen died, I counted more than 50 stories in one British broadsheet the following day. Very few people will have read more than one or two.

The overproduction of stories has ironically only worsened with digital publishing. Previously, editors were restricted by the size of the newspaper. They were finite. A website is not, so editing becomes a less exacting task. There’s no limit to the number of stories you can publish every day, so why not keep pumping them out. No wonder readers say they feel overwhelmed by the tsunami of news they face every day.

Stories are also written the same way they always have been. The vast majority of straight news stories follow the traditional “inverted pyramid” structure, which was conceived to make them easy to cut down in the age of the typewriter. If they don’t, they will invariably have a colour intro. With features and interviews, the family resemblance to the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s described above is even clearer.

Of course there’s video and audio, but are they truly integrated into the core reporting process? The evidence, both from observation and conversation, is that they are not.

Yeah, you might say, but we have digital storytelling teams who are telling stories in new, digitally native ways. That is true, and some are producing some excellent work, but I would urge you to talk to them. With a few notable exceptions, most of them are pissed off that you typically come and ask them to add “digital extras” or “some bells and whistles” to a story long after it has been filed. They often don’t get bylines and are left feeling that they are not regarded as being “real” journalists.

The products being offered to readers are still mostly print-made-digital in genesis and execution. It’s not only the mastheads and fonts that have transferred from newspapers to their digital descendants but also the format and thinking behind the articles. Sure, we have live blogs now, and there is the “SEO striptease” where the recipe or time of the match is revealed a painfully long way down the article, and occasionally there is a “five key takeaways from…” or “explainer” piece, but mostly the structure of the stories would not surprise a time traveller from the 1970s.

Indeed, it’s a good argument that the most significant news-related innovation of the digital era so far was not invented by a news company but by Instagram. Their Stories are purely digital, combine the video, audio and photographic capabilities of the smartphone and have created something truly new.

Another print holdover is that editing – with a few honourable exceptions – is still mostly done on vibes rather than data. How we assess what works and is valuable to readers is purely subjective and comes down to what individuals think. I used to joke in conference speeches that there were only three metrics in the print era: circulation, ad revenue, and whether the editor-in-chief liked your story. For many newsrooms, the latter metric is still the most important.

This pervades the organisation. Stories are predominantly judged on how they are received internally rather than externally. A colleague and I used to raise our eyebrows and inwardly smile when at an editorial conference, some editor would say “I could read more on [topic x]…” I’d think: I’m sure you could, but what do readers want?

We indulge in magical thinking

All this needs to be combined with the elements of magical thinking that pervade many newsrooms. What do I mean by that? A classic is that print newspapers will experience a resurgence in the same way that vinyl has done. While this is an interesting sociological trend – in relation to the enduring value of physical, tactile goods – vinyl nevertheless represents less than 5% of music consumption. Nobody really expects the glory days to return but there is hope there will be some kind of dead cat bounce.

There is also magical thinking surrounding journalism’s role within society. I have had many conversations with people on the business side of the news media which at some point involve them rolling their eyes and muttering about journalists’ elevated view of their work. They felt that any time they even suggest that the newsroom might, just might, think about doing something differently, mostly in an attempt to satisfy customers, they were hit by an attitude that some characterise as “leave us alone, we have a sacred calling”.

This is especially true in the United States where journalists have given themselves a constitutional role as the “fourth estate”. I understand and appreciate their role in “holding the powerful to account” but feel that they might remember that this is a self-appointed role. Nobody will jump in to support them if they don’t meet their readers’ needs.

In America more than anywhere else, the business side feels more like an unwelcome constraint on the newsroom. This is madness and is actively slowing down the necessary transformation of these businesses. The journalists there are lucky the market they serve is one of the biggest and certainly the richest in the world. I don’t think they’d like the cold winds that are blowing much harder through smaller places.

All this and I haven’t really mentioned AI yet. Alarmingly there is some magical thinking in newsrooms here too. Many are happy to report on how it will be the scourge of white-collar jobs everywhere, but seem to be operating on the working assumption which I would categorise as “yeah, but not journalism”. So, it’ll decimate the ranks of lawyers, accountants, even doctors, but not your profession?

I beg to differ. I fear that in the near-future there will be a reduced corps of journalists worldwide. Much of their output will be produced, wholly or in part, by bots.

At this point, I’d make a distinction between “journalism” and “information”.

Information is sometimes dressed up as journalism but really is the transcription of facts. It is reporting on press releases, ministerial press conferences, corporate events, sports results, and so on. If we’re honest with ourselves, there’s not a huge amount of context and analysis added to these pieces. At least, there doesn’t seem to be. This kind of content, I believe, will be entirely produced by bots, maybe with very limited human oversight, in the next couple of years.

Journalism, true journalism, is different. It’s the stuff that bots will struggle to do for the foreseeable future. They don’t have the contacts to dig out scoops; they can’t (really) do interviews; if they attempt to offer analysis or context, it’s incredibly vanilla. These are the kind of things we humans should focus on.

Even there, I think we need to make a big shift to a new journalism. What does that look like? Well, here we go…

1 Be user first … but really mean it

Lots of publications give lip service to being user first. I remember a decade or so ago being amused by an editor who used to say “readers like this” or “readers expect that”. I thought: how on earth would you know? This was a man who never spoke to readers and certainly didn’t look at data.

His instinct was right though.

Journalism will only continue to be relevant if it is ruthlessly and unequivocally focused on what users – they are no longer just readers, but watchers and listeners too – want from it.

Reporters and editors need to interrogate their motives for and the outcome of everything they publish. Who am I creating this for? What will they want to get from it? How am I going to make sure they get it? Is this piece or video or graphic actually useful to them?

The growing understanding of the user needs framework so brilliantly espoused by Dmitry Shishkin is a step in the right direction. It is a very useful tool to help guide newsrooms in the right direction. I would urge newsrooms to refer to it at the start of their commissioning process, not just as part of an analysis of what has already been published.

Likewise, Thomas Baekdal’s campaign to promote the idea of relevancy in news. This is very similar to what I am saying here.

Being user first actually means being audiences first, but that’ll never catch on because those are a pair of words that don’t sound good together. It’s the right term though because it reflects the broad and varied interests of your readers. In one publication, you may have an audience for economic coverage, another for book reviews, one for football, one for ballet. They will probably overlap in some cases and will certainly encompass different demographics.

The danger in saying you are user first is assuming that there’s only one kind of user. I recall talk in my last job of the “Times reader” and for everyone it meant the same thing: a relatively well-off and well-educated white-haired man aged somewhere between 55 and 70 (or maybe older). Of course we had a broader range of readers than that but in the newsroom’s eyes, they were writing with this old fella in mind.

Accept that your audience could be anyone with an interest in the topic you’re covering and you’ll get to a better place.

This does not mean not covering stories that you, as journalists, believe are important. You must still do that. But do it in a way that your readers find engaging (see below).

2 Talk to your customers

Don’t come back at me about calling them customers – that’s what they are. They are paying in one way or another for your content (and if they’re not, they should be). And we should be fully aware that we need to provide them with value for their investment of time and money.

It still astonishes me how little media companies talk to them. I realise this is a generalisation but I’m prepared to bet that no newsroom in the world actually talks to its customers on a systematic weekly basis. There will be various initiatives but the actual business of user research is usually left to others.

When I say talk to customers, I don’t mean at your dinner party with friends; I mean out on the streets, in railway stations, in coffee shops. Find out what they think about your products, your rivals’ products and the news ecosystem in general. It will be enlightening.

When we came to redesign our smartphone app and website at The Times in 2016, we used a design agency called Ideo who were proponents of design thinking. This involves at its core a deep observation of customers and potential customers to try and understand what it is they want from a product. They followed people throughout their day, observing them at breakfast, on their commutes, at their place of work or education and then at home in the evening.

It was an incredibly instructive experience – not least because the solution that emerged was completely different from prevailing orthodoxy about news at the time. Rather than being keen on “snacking content” (remember that?), the readers said they wanted depth and expertise and someone to make sense of all the news noise. A very different product was born out of simply listening to the people who would use it.

One final thing, if ever someone in your organisation says of readers: “they don’t know what they want,” fire them immediately. Users really do know what they want and you haven’t got time to waste educating the naysayers. Move on and get some empathetic listeners instead.

3 The data is your readers

It is astonishing how resistant journalism has been to data. There are exceptions, of course, but I have spoken to countless data teams who respond with pursed lips when you ask how data literate the journalists they work with are.

Astonishing, but understandable in a way. These were organisations that until 20 years ago or so had no data at all. Well, they did but it was limited to circulation and ad sales. It’s difficult to change a culture where the opinion of the editor will always outrank data.

Sometimes the resistance takes the form of denying the accuracy of the data. “It must be wrong,” said a group of editors one time when I showed them some unimpeachable data. I figured the reason was that they didn’t much like the editor whose section was performing surprisingly (to them) well.

Other times they engage in whataboutery. “If we follow the data, won’t all the journalists just end up writing about Harry and Meghan?” This came from an otherwise very confident editor. My response was simple: “You’re the editor. You can tell them not to.”

A more sophisticated argument was one that was made to me more recently. “If we follow the data we wouldn’t write about climate change because people don’t read stories about it. But it’s an important topic and certainly part of our journalistic mission to report on it.”

Yes, I said, you must write about it, but you need to find a way to make people want to read about it. And ultimately it’ll be the data that tells you when you’ve found it.

We also need to overcorrect towards what readers want, rather than what we think is important for them to know. The latter, hardwired into the journalistic psyche, is not going to go away, but we do need to moderate it with the information our analytics gives us.

My simplest argument on this subject is that the data is your readers. Never have we known so much about what our readers actually want to read and how long they are prepared to read it. This is a blessing and we should embrace it further.

There have been debates about whether newsrooms should be “data informed” or “data led”. I think that we need to catch up with the rest of the world on data and if that means saying the aspiration is to be “data led” but knowing that you might just about end up being “data informed” then that’s a good way to go.

4 Institute a “digital pause” in your newsroom

The business of journalism moves fast and we don’t often take stock of what we’ve done and what we’re about to do. A lot of the day to day of journalism is based on muscle memory: “we do it this way because this is the way we’ve always done it.” We don’t have time to stop and think about it.

I would counter that there’s always time to do that, and that your journalism will benefit from even the slightest pause before diving into coverage.

It’s something we have talked about a lot with our clients who have seen real benefits from it. We say to them that when something happens and an editor wants to commission a story from a reporter or writer, they should stop, even if only for 30 seconds, and think about who the story is targeting, what will they want to know, how is the best way to tell it and, even at this early stage, what will be a follow-up.

We’ve seen this produce higher engagement and lower story counts, as previous “standard issue” ideas are jettisoned or combined into a bigger piece.

Others are taking this idea further and are beginning to operate on the assumption that they will not produce a story when news breaks. The challenge then is to provide good reasons for it to be commissioned. This is bold and I look forward to seeing how the experiment develops.

To diverge briefly into considering the business of journalism, this pause is key as it will allow you to ask the question: what is distinctive about how we are covering this story? What are we as a publication offering that others won’t? Because this is the key to creating a successful journalism business. Readers consistently say that the number one reason they will pay for news is because a publication offers them “something I can’t get elsewhere”. This consideration should be built into the pause.

5 Don’t just think about text

We were so badly scarred by the “pivot to video” and the subsequent “pivot from video” that we may be missing the big picture. A whole generation is coming up who are emphatically video first in their consumption. Don’t kid yourself that they will migrate to text eventually. They won’t.

How do you deal with these video natives? Simple: employ them and give them permission to tell stories in ways they find appealing. Don’t worry about giving up editorial control over the output – this is your future they are determining.

There’s a bit of runway, so you have time to experiment. But not as much as you did 10 years ago when video really kicked off.

Alongside video, you need to think about audio. I don’t just mean podcasts. They are very well and good, if hard to monetise, but not where your focus should lie in terms of audio.

Actually you should be thinking as much about audio inputs as outputs. It’s a prediction of course but it feels likely that in five to 10 years’ time we will mostly interact with the digital world by means of our voice. We will ask our AI assistants questions and they will give us voiced answers.

So how does your output fit into that modality? Time to start experimenting.

If you do decide that text is the right way to tell your story, also experiment with the way you do this. The formats that we have grown up with were based on the requirements of print and its space constraints. Now you have an unlimited canvas – stories can be much shorter, or much longer; or a mix of the two. There’s no reason you can’t present different ways of consuming the same piece of content in a single article – target your headline at those who want to graze; bullet points at the time poor; a long read at those who want to go deeper.

6 Produce less

For years now, every single study about news avoidance reports back that users feel overwhelmed by the volume of content they are faced with every day. And what has been the news industry’s response? More content.

No wonder we don’t get the engagement we think we deserve. We are disrespectful of people’s time.

Yes, people spend a lot of time every day on their phones. But they aren’t reading news. Mostly they are diverting themselves with a bit of light entertainment.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But we must accept that people have a “budget” for the amount of time they will engage with news content. And, as discussed above, it’s not very long. (Note: I realise the irony of urging this in such a long article, but if you’ve got this far, you’ll forgive me, I hope.)

We need to return to the traditional skill of editing, which has been overwhelmed by the trend of volume publishing that we’ve seen in the past decade.

Editing is all about working out what’s important for your audience(s) and giving it to them in the most effective way. Often that most effective way will be quickly and with clarity.

Sometimes it’ll be longer, and happily we are on the cusp of AI tools that will repurpose content for every user’s individual preference at the press of a button. But mostly news publishers would benefit from offering less, more considered content.

7 Be AI curious

A recent survey by Deloitte reported that nearly 20% of European workers were using generative AI apps to complete tasks at work without the permission of their employers. 20%! Within two years of ChatGPT’s launch!

There is no doubt that this is a world-changing phenomenon.

My advice to publishers is to get on board as soon as they can. And to set no limits to what they will allow AI to do.

They need to imagine a future where AI tools will help them to source, write (film, record, etc), edit and distribute stories in the format and in products that meet each individual user’s preference.

This is really not that far away. AI tools that can mimic much of a reporter’s work are already in production and producing good (enough) copy. You can also create video and audio from text, and in the tone and at the length desired. Personalising to the level of an individual is a hell of a lot easier than it was just a year or two ago.

We have to embrace these changes rather than resist them. Don’t put yourself in the role of a horse and carriage worker who laughed at the fools trying to build a “mechanical horse” in the early years of the last century.

Here’s a thought for you: I think at least 5% of a publisher’s headcount should be exclusively focused on the exploration of AI and what it can do for its publications. We were too slow with our digital transformation. We cannot afford to be so tardy this time.

8 Talk to your colleagues

This might not sound very high falutin’ or insightful. But I honestly think the most important thing that journalists could do to secure their future is to talk to colleagues in the rest of the business. I think the inputs they get from them will be good for their journalistic output.

I know some do, and it’s better than it was before in the high days of “church” and “state”, but still too many journalists exist in a world where they take pride in not understanding the business.

The problem is that we can’t afford to have such affectations any more. I say affectations advisedly. But really, think about the assumptions of the expression “church and state”. Who do we think we are?!

Journalism has always been a business. One with an important role to play in society, but a business nonetheless. As many of our colleagues are finding out, the normal rules of profit and loss, and insolvency and closure, apply to us too.

Frankly, it is astonishing the barriers we put between ourselves and the people who are trying to sell our work. Can you imagine this happening in any other type of business?

And if you do talk to them you’ll find out that they are both enthusiastic about your work and thinking very hard about a profitable future for it. They will certainly be talking to your users, finding out the formats in which they want to consume news, obsessing over data, thinking about how they might use AI in the near-future.

In short, they can help you. They want to help you, you just have to let them.

—

I’ve been thinking about why I wrote this (very) long treatise about the future of journalism. Mostly it’s because I love the profession and its people and desperately want to see them prosper. I think that’s in greater jeopardy now than ever before.

I wanted to give voice to some ideas that are talked about in the corner of newsrooms and in bars after news media conferences. I also feel obliged as someone who has had the privilege to work in this industry for three decades to offer at least some ideas about how journalism can regain its status in society. It’s easy to be critical but harder, as I can attest, to work out a solution.

There are many things I didn’t cover – news products, for example. But I wanted to stick with the journalistic side of things as much as possible. Even there I will have left things out. I didn’t take on the subject of partisanship in news organisation because that is a doctoral thesis on its own – and it is clear to me that the long-term benefit comes from not being partisan.

Please tell me if you think I have got things wrong (newsrooms being slow to acknowledge their shortcomings is another thing I didn’t cover…) or you have better ideas.

But to conclude – at last – if you remember nothing else from the above, here are my three intended takeaways as we chart a path towards a new journalism:

1 Be obsessive about serving your audiences with what they want, not what you think they want. If you think a story is something they need to know, tell it to them in a way that resonates with them. Your analytics will tell you what that is.

2 Lean into telling stories in new formats and using new technologies. Don’t hang on to the old ways of doing things. You may have grown up with news in text form but people don’t any more and they never will again. You might not instinctively like what the future looks like, but it will look that way.

3 Remember that you’re part of a business – one which needs all of its parts to work together to survive and, hopefully, to thrive. There is more time for good journalism in organisations that are pulling in the same direction.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory