Promote your audience chief. Right now!

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I have long believed that op-ed columnists should be given five years in the job and then be sent out to pasture or other assignments. My experience is that after that long in the job – and to be honest, probably sooner – they aren’t saying anything new.

The necessity of producing a cogent argument on a topic 40-plus weeks a year means they naturally start repeating themselves. Indeed, I once edited a columnist who recycled their ideas and anecdotes every couple of years, much to the dismay of their regular copy editor. They were, however, incredibly popular ideas and anecdotes so we let it pass.

I say all this because this week I will repeat myself. But about a subject that is so important that it needs to be aired again.

The inspiration was a tweet by Ryan Y Kellet, formerly of Axios and the Washington Post and now co-founder of the Independent Journalism Atlas, which exists to map and promote creator journalists outside the mainstream.

“Audience teams are dying and that is reflected in the Axios layoffs today,” he wrote. I must admit this was news to me.

However, it was this line that really caught my attention: “To the publishing leaders: ask your audience folks to do new, high-priority things! They are among the most adaptable staff in your organisation across training, product and project management, editors, talent relations, talent themselves, creative, events, and so much more.”

Hear, hear! I thought, then found myself wondering if they really are dying, as Ryan said. I thought audience teams were at last making in-roads at traditional publishers and growing in importance so this was worrying.

I asked around. One audience chief said: “We’re not dying but it remains a frustrating job. The editor-in-chief may be right behind us, but in meetings the senior editors smile and nod, then do something different. Or, if they are feeling really threatened, they tell us the data is wrong.”

Another, with a background outside journalism, said: “They just won’t listen. I don’t know what it is about newsrooms…”

This is concerning and only hardens me in the view I expressed in October, which is that audience teams represent the future of newsrooms. As Ryan said, they need promoting, not sidelining.

We will always need great reporters who can dig out a scoop and display real expertise around their subject – which, to be fair, is what Axios says is now its focus – but we need people with the skills to find and connect with the audiences who want to read, watch or listen to that content (and to know whether it should be presented as text, video or audio in the first place).

Often it is the audience teams who know a publication’s audience better than anyone. They know what people are consuming and, arguably more crucially, what they are not. They have a sense of what the wider conversation is around topics and what readers expect of their publication’s coverage, an instinct honed by years of immersing themselves in user data and comments.

I agree with Dimitry Shiskin, who back in October argued that it was time someone took a risk and appointed an audience specialist as editor-in-chief. We’ve had PR experts and former politicians become editors in the UK alone. So why not?

A few publications have followed the Wall Street Journal’s lead and declared themselves to be “audience first”. Now they need to really embody that statement because with traffic declining, ad revenues disappearing and subs growth under pressure everyone must find their customers wherever they are and make sure they are giving them what they want. And audience teams are the best placed to do that.

This bears repeating over and over again.