A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

When my search for the financial future of news stalled on a question about
successful business models, it gained traction with another: What can we learn from
what’s not working? 1
Immersed in the debris of unlikely solutions, I wondered: What experiments are
most likely to yield, someday, the models that elude us today?
That question prompted another, which finally got me an answer: The best prospects
for sustaining journalism in the future are rooted in the most important stakeholders of
its past and present: that collection of readers, viewers and listeners also known as users.
Placing users first does not presume they’ll pay most of journalism’s bills any time
soon. They—we—do need to pay more than we’re paying now. But the real advantage of
a user‐first approach is the route it opens to maximizing journalism’s value to all its
stakeholders—advertisers, communities and investors as well as news consumers. It’s a
framework that reflects the personal, distributed and social ethos of digital publishing
and the deepest traditions of independent journalism. 2
User‐first also fits two important, still emerging platforms: mobile and e‐reader
tablets. Among their most promising dimensions is the capacity to deliver customized
content—commercial as well as editorial—based on the location of the user. 3
The user‐first framework focuses attention on the industry’s current hot topic, paid
content, but only as one experimental business model among many. In some ways, the
pay wall debate has obscured other initiatives that users are pursuing to help sustain
journalism, not all of them direct and not all of them financial. A growing portion of the
new value attached to news is being produced by users themselves as they enhance the
work of journalists with their own reporting, recommendations and distribution.
The user‐first approach that may, someday, challenge interruptive advertising as
journalism’s paymaster has nothing to do with what consumers should or shouldn’t pay.
The shift in the economic underpinnings of news is harsher than that, bound by the
actual value that journalism’s multiple stakeholders find—or don’t find—in the
products and services created around news.
“In the end, the most important people shaping tomorrow’s news won’t be the
owners or the journalists, but the readers and viewers,” Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert
3