There’s so much to shake a weary head at in journalism.
For starters, there’s lack of investment, cuts, clickbait, the slow death of print, reporters who don’t know the area, a lack of senior guidance and the lack of local stories on local news sites.
But there are intriguing trends that an old hack like me thinks the public sector can learn from.
In short, it’s asking yourself what people would like and then creating content with that in mind.
The two trends are solutions journalism and user needs. They’re a lot of crossover between the two.
What solutions journalism is
In short, solutions journalism is reporting not just the problem but how people can crack the problem, too. For me, the BBC’s ‘Seven proven ways to help the planet’ falls into this category for me. So does Birmingham World’s ‘14 places to get a cheap day out in Birmingham and the West Midlands in May 2025. The problem being cracked here are ways people with families can keep their brood entertained.
itself is an idea that emerged in a New York Times column after 2010 that news isn’t just reporting what’s gone wrong but what people are doing to tackle the problem
More seriously, Reuters Institute for Journalism has carried out research showing that it is starting to get results across the world. If you are fed-up of a wave of bad news here’s what’s being done about it too.
This is a numbers game. There is further research that readers spend more time on solutions journalism stories. If you are a publisher, this is a little flash of gold.
What user needs journalism is
Like many people in the public sector, user needs has been the driving force of public sector internets of the past 15 years. Government Digital Service and others have had the unbreakable mantra of user needs as central to what they do. It makes sense. You want going to a .gov.uk website to be as easy as possible.
What I’ve not been aware of so much is ‘user needs’ in journalism. The more I hear about it the more I wonder if this is also something to pay attention to.
The user needs model is focusing on what users literally need first. The apoproach, it seems comes from the BBC circa 2016 and has been refined through data science.
The concept is that there are four catageories for consuming news.
Knowledge – keep me engaged and update me
Understanding – educate me and give me perspective
Feeling – divert me and inspire me
Doing – connect me and help me
An analysis has shown that readers stay longer when these approaches are tried. Readers are also more loyal, it seems. Reuters Institute Digital News 2024 devotes an entire chapter to it.
Brighter people than me insist that ‘solutions’ journalism’ and ‘users needs’ are slightly different in approach with solutions more tactical and user needs adopted on a newsroom-wide basis. That’s fine. It’s an argument I’ll steer clear of.
But what can public sector comms learn from all this?
For me, the really interesting approach both share is thinking about what will work for the member of the public. What matters to them?
On the one hand, encouraging people to stay longer on your website is not strictly a metric the public sector goes after. You want to find out swimming pool opening tikes and then go. But the concept of ‘user needs’ is something that the public sector web is used to.
What it can mean, and I think this is wonderfully attractive, is to wonder what happens if you put the interests of users first. Maybe some of the time. Going back to the health term activities, councils are used to writing three press releases to give each a moment in the sun. One is a free swimming at the pool, another is a town centre fun day and the third is an event in the park. But what happens when you parcel them up differently, so they can be one compelling piece of content that gets more eyeballs?
The reality is that newspapers don’t have the same need for press releases anymore because they have stopped being newspapers.
Instead, they are digital-first news brands who put greater value on clicks than they do print readers.
I started to look at these two approaches with a view to advise reshaping content sent to news titles in the area.
I’m coming round to the idea that maybe its public sector content itself that needs to experiment with these approaches.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if it did.
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Creative Commons picture credit: ceridwen / Newsagent, Hampstead / CC BY-SA 2.0
