The most comprehensive news user needs model in charts and graphs

It's finally here - the updated, fresh from Indesign, latest, all-encompassing model of news content user needs, jointly developed by smartocto and I. The whitepaper on the subject is about 12000 words and is 89 pages long. I hope you will enjoy reading and sharing it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

For my own record, I am selecting the most important points as a Linkedin article, and here you see the executive summary in several charts and graphs.

1. It's been almost 6 years since I presented the original BBC World Service model at the now-defunct Global Editors Network meeting in Vienna in the summer 2017. Since then more than 20 newsrooms joined the fun, irrespective of their niche - international, national, regional, local and niche publishers have been successfully experimenting with user needs-centric content strategies.

This was spotted by Nic Newman who included it in Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism 2023 media and tech trends report.

…"Another key trend is the way in which product and editorial teams have been embracing ‘user needs’ models and ‘jobs to be done’ methodologies to help identify opportunities. This year [2023] we can expect more examples of user needs models driving new product development, not just content commissioning… [from Chapter 7]

2. Having analysed all the models out there - many of them being versions of the original one, but many purely original - smartocto , an editorial analytics company that deeply believes in the importance of user needs and has plenty of tools to help you become more effective and more actionable about it, and I came up with a combined model, consisting of four axes.

3. These four axes around facts, context, emotions and actions are populated by eight user needs, with some brand-specific variations, which I'll tell you more about later on.

The eight basic news user needs are:

• Update me
• Keep me engaged
• Educate me
• Give me perspective
• Inspire me
• Divert me
• Help me
• Connect me

4. As you see, there are two new user needs and one reframed one. The first two relate to an action-driven axis (Help me and Connect me) and the other one takes a wider focus on an older Keep me on trend user need. We believe that Keep me engaged is a more detailed user need, that focuses on the importance of staying up-to-date with current events and participating in the conversation and discussions surrounding them.

The real fun starts when you go into brand-specific user needs. While they still sit under the main eight ones, you can see how different newsrooms added their own flavour to their audience's needs.

• Orientate me (BBC News English) - fact-driven, somewhere around Update me and Keep me engaged
• Help me discover new ideas (The Atlantic) - context driven, somewhere around Give me perspective
• Connect micro to macro (Vox) - context driven, somewhere around Educate me
• Enrich my life (NY Times) - emotion-driven, somewhere around Inspire Me towards Connect me
• Give me an edge (Wall Street Journal) - context driven, somewhere around Give me perspective
• Make me feel responsible (Vogue) - action-driven, somewhere around Connect me
• Let me take a meaningful break (The Atlantic) - emotion-driven, somewhere around Divert Me 
• Help me take it forward (Context) - action-driven, around Connect me, a little bit towards Help me
• Motivate me (The Conversation) - action-driven, around Help me but a bit towards Connect me
• Show me how the world is affected by it (TBIJ) - fact-driven, around Keep me engaged’

5. Show me the data! Here you go. The whole point of tracking and optimising for user needs is to make a business case that appreciating this variable will do wonders for your digital performance.

All three charts below demonstrate how valuable non-Update me articles are for these publishers. We worked with data from seven different newsrooms. They are all anonymised, but you do see some broad descriptions below. The charts are fairly easy to read, they show the median effectiveness of different user needs articles against the total output of different user needs.

Reach, engagement, conversion - all these metrics improve when it comes to looking at them through the lens of user needs.

What if your editorial analytics provider was actually converting those signals into actionable insights that your newsroom would respect and use as a guide? Shocking, right? I don’t think so. If done smartly, this approach could be very powerful, helping the editorial, product and business sides of your media company.   

I'll leave a fantastic quote by Scott Galloway (Prof G to some) to confirm that newsrooms using such signals are on the right track.

…If data is the new oil, algorithms are the refineries, and signals make the oil lighter, sweeter, and more valuable…

6. So when it comes to algorithmic signals, you can do so much with them. For example, you can put any type of your output inside a quadrant model to see what's working and what's not working (second chart below). You can start receiving smart notifications to suggest action (the next chart). You can visualise your publishing patterns through the lens of user needs (the third one below).

7. In the whitepaper, we also write about challenges and opportunities.

Of course, so much depends on clean data and consistent tagging. Many stories have multiple user needs in them (they should not really!), what do we do with those? Is our data really Big Data? Will it ever be? Can we use the same algorithm for different languages?

The opportunities are numerous, too. I am sure chatbots will have a lot to help with (as you see in the image below). There is no doubt that prediction quality will go up, and that newsrooms will join the federated algorithm learning (talk to us about it!). We also think that newsrooms might start tagging separate paragraphs with different user needs and will definitely utilise smart notifications.

As a former Culture Trip Chief Content Officer, I loved using the travel content user needs model in our work and I know that we'll start seeing other sectors developing their own specific content user needs. Food? Retail? Sport? Personal finance? Consumer goods? I'd love to go into these areas and help users connect with its content better.

Ultimately, as we write in the closing part of the paper, "it’s not about just optimising output, it’s about creativity.  It’s about moving away from combative, military linguistic terms (fights for reader revenue, battles for attention, wars of attrition). It’s not about quashing the competition, but flourishing in our own unique niche by answering the questions and addressing the issues our own, very specific audiences have. Understanding why audiences value us, what they ask of us and how we can deliver those things. Your audience will thank you, your charts will start going in the right direction and you’ll probably even have more fun in the process". 

Thank you for your attention. If you have questions about user needs models or would like me to help your company with them, please get in touch. If you have a model I might be missing, please let me know, too. 

You can reach me either here or on Twitter @dmitryshishkin - I am interested in content creation, digital products, innovation, digital transformation, synthetic media, the developing world, leadership in the global setting, and other exciting things this decade is so rich of.