Why It’s Time News Got to Know Its Readers
A personal take on the importance of user research in news
It has long been assumed that news publishers serve an unknowable mass audience. There’s a certain passivity to this descriptor for readers that doesn’t seem quite right — at least not in the internet age. Each of us experiences a different internet, one that we customise to suit our specific needs and around which we build patterns of behaviour. It’s not entirely different with the way readers now consume news.
In theory, with the advent of the internet, it ought to be possible for publishers to reach anyone with an internet connection and serve them both news that they want to know and news that they should know. Such an information diet is very much a function of the community or communities to which a reader belongs. My community may not be comprised of people with whom I share a resemblance, but an ideology or experience. Some of these communities are grossly underserved.
The process for publishers to get to know their readers probably involves an amount of user research, something I first heard about while studying systems engineering.
I had been tasked with designing a learning tool for operators of a drone search-and-rescue system. I’d spent the last three years researching system design and…
