Every morning, without fail, I wake up to an email from the Financial Times alerting me to stories in the morning’s edition. The timing is perfect and the strategy flawless. I certainly do check the news first thing so the newsletter ensures that the FT is my first port of call.
It was a full six years ago that the now VP Audience Strategy at Condé Nast Sarah Marshall wrote in her predictions for Niemann Lab that one thing we can do in 2020 is to cater to ‘news moments’ (a term she credits to Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2019).
The Reuters report had highlighted four key moments of news consumption for young people: dedicated moments, updates, time fillers and intercepted moments.
From news moments to news needs
In the article, Sarah explains how she developed this thinking to identify the different ‘news needs’ people have at particular moments. This was informed by Condé Nast’s qualitative research which led her to pinpoint six needs of Vogue audiences: inspire me, divert me, update me, educate me, make me responsible and connect me. Then she created this useful grid (below) which links news moment to need to times to platforms.
Credit: https://www.niemanlab.org/images/my-news-moments-table.png
Describing the job of audience editors as being to get stories in front of more readers, she says her hope is that ‘news needs’ and ‘news moments’ are tools used when writing stories, considering formats and designing products.
Audience strategy in podcasting
Since this article appeared, audience strategy has become increasingly sophisticated, particularly, I would say, among brands and marketeers. While media organisations such as Condé Nast have clearly been leading the field, others are struggling to catch up – particularly those who effectively appeared to outsource their audience strategy to social media platforms.
These ideas were further developed by Dr Richard Fletcher in 2024 with an article entitled More than ‘just the facts’: How news audiences think about ‘user needs’. The User Needs 2.0 identified eight needs sitting within four categories of more basic needs: knowledge, understanding, feeling and doing.
Of course, these ideas are not only applicable to news media. As podcast creators within an increasingly crowded marketplace, we have learnt during our course that getting our work in front of audiences is a vital skill and is just as important as conceptualising and making outstanding podcasts. That’s why a strategic and timely approach which matches the right ways to express our core content to the right platforms at the right times helps to align with audience needs and thus boost engagement and discoverability.
