The challenge of creating digital content that stands out and has impact on a reader is one publishers and broadcasters are all too aware of. Media organisations face fierce competition for attention amongst audiences across all age groups — be it from direct competitors, social media networks as well as a growing band of news creators and influencers. Add the more recent and rapid advances in artificial intelligence — including automating content generation and distribution — then this is only going to get harder. As the supply of news further increases, how do you ensure relevance and interest in what you have to say?
One avenue and approach taken up by some media brands to address this is adopting a ‘user needs’ model to help them establish a more audience-centred approach to their output. This is a framework developed a decade ago which guides journalists on what content best works to serve their audiences and is now being used by an increasing number of publishers to evolve their content strategies. Jeremy Clifford, a publishing consultant and trainer, says that a focus on user needs allows content and audience teams to “rise above the daily humdrum of news” to a place where content has “a reason or purpose to it”.
The movement originated at the BBC through work spearheaded in its World Service digital operation headed by Dmitry Shishkin (who is now a strategic editorial advisor to a European publishing business called Ringier). Shishkin was drawn to research that indicated consumers of online news content were looking for six distinctive needs — update me, give me perspective, educate me, keep me on trend, amuse / divert me and inspire me. And he used this as a starting off point to evolve the content offered by editorial teams as the World Service grew geographically and across different languages.
From that initial work emerged a wider movement in digital publishing circles with many brands adopting the framework — from global names such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to the Metro and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (see panel). Since going public in 2017, the model has evolved into eight user needs (the two extras are help me and connect me) and is used across most forms of journalism and across increasing geographic territories.
The best way of illustrating how the model works would be to take a piece of breaking news and then to work up theoretical examples of what type of content covering and following up the event could fit with each of the eight user needs based on headlines. The example in a report on user needs released by FT Strategies earlier this year is a volcanic eruption in Iceland.
To some, a user needs approach would seem pretty obvious for publishers to focus on. The six initial user needs don’t appear too far from the BBC’s original organisational purpose set by Lord Reith to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. And an experienced journalist would look at the needs and think they are another way of a reporter or writer coming up with different angles for their coverage. Is there a case of the emperor’s new clothes about user needs?
Proponents of user needs would point to three main reasons why implementing the framework is more substantive and drives positive results such as increasing traffic, audience loyalty and conversions:
1. It meets evolving audience behaviours and expectations. As the FT Strategies report puts it, news consumption is “driven not just by a desire to stay informed, but by a range of emotional, practical, and intellectual needs. People don’t just want to know what’s happening; they want to understand why it matters, how it affects them, and what they can do about it.”
2. The framework blends principles and theory with analytics. This enables publishers to be systematic in understanding how their content currently fits in meeting user needs and then to set goals and targets for the future. Analytics software can track performance closely so the results are measurable — but crucially, as user needs expert Khalil Cassimally puts it, this is based on simple language which can be shared across different teams and functions.
3. The model can inform and direct your overall content strategy, both the type and topic of the story but also the format, from length of text to video or audio content as well as the time of publication whether that’s morning or evening or day of the week.
On the content strategy point, Clifford finds the most value from the implementation of user needs is for it to define a media brand’s overall strategy. “I tend to ask a client at the offset — if you didn’t exist what would your audience be missing?” This then is a way to establish what a title’s core purpose is and then what the audience needs are likely to be, adds Clifford. He doesn’t overstate what user needs can offer media businesses however, describing them as not a “solution to everything” but as a “tool to differentiate you (from the competition)”.
Results so far back up Clifford’s view. Of those publishers that are actively using the framework, it is allowing newsrooms to become more efficient and agile as well as improve site traffic, SEO performance as well as convert more audiences from free to paying. Metro UK saw a YoY increase in page views whilst also dropping the volume of content by 30% for its entertainment section whilst Berlingske Media, a Danish media business, has a small team specifically trained in user needs that creates only 4% of the content but is responsible for 30% of conversions of audiences from free to subscribers.
And user needs can also go some way to addressing an emerging issue facing the news industry — news avoidance. Recently, Reuters Institute’s Digital News Reports have highlighted this trend — and whilst in the latest 2025 report, the proportion of audiences switching off from news has stabilised it can’t be ignored. And the reasons that audience gives for avoiding news — from there being too much news on conflict / war and politics to that “there is nothing I can do with the information” and “it’s too hard to understand” — offer an argument for publishers to look seriously at the framework to evolve what and how much news and information they are producing. It’s never been more important to listen to your readers.
How best to introduce user needs in your business
Here are some tips from those who have implemented it:
- Start simple: “Like a lot of digital transformation work, it’s best to experiment and get quick wins first,” says consultant Khalil Cassimally who suggests forming a small cross functional group of enthusiasts implementing the process on a small part of your content offering (or section) before rolling out more widely.
- Don’t overdo the data: Keeping track of the data is important but it’s best not to overpower teams with too much of it — in particular at the start of the process. “Don’t supply them with graphs that make you pass out,” as Lars Jensen, audience development lead at Berlingske Media, put it at the NewsRewired event in May. And whilst there are tailored analytic software packages out there you can use that support implementation, they’re not essential according to Clifford. You can start by tagging content by user need in your CMS he says.
- Don’t overtag: It’s best to identify one user need per article. “You want to make it so clear to the team what the needs are,” says Oliver Kemp from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
User needs in action — at scale and niche
Two media brands in the UK spearheading the introduction of user needs at different scales are Metro and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Both started using these principles around two years ago and were led by their respective audience teams who worked closely with editors and journalists to commission and write content in different ways.
For Metro, it was a way to change their approach to content production from one largely reliant on creating viral articles to more meeting audience needs according to Sofia Delgado, audience growth director. This was part of a wider digital change programme covering other areas such as digital storytelling and SEO.
Delgado says the approach has helped in topic areas such as entertainment and sport — for the former, it allowed the team to look at producing different type of content for film. Metro wasn’t a title for ‘film buffs’ so the team looked at creating film content for the audience they had on the site. And for sport, this allowed the team to focus less on ‘update me’ stories to write more explainer and analysis.
At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, audience editor Oliver Kemp worked closely with his editorial team to shift from one main content format to several — based on tailored user needs they developed internally to fit with their overall mission. “Up to this point, editorially, the main approach to content was the big reveal — (for the team) to expose the injustices that they were investigating,” he says. The team is now producing more explainer articles — such as a very popular one produced in the run-up to last year’s general election on the issue of trans rights. This has also improved the site’s SEO Kemp said. In addition, the editorial team is producing more first-person content for the bureau’s email newsletter — which falls under the ‘involve me’ user need and talks about how they uncovered the information in the investigative work.
Kemp says they are looking to add another user need around action to see how readers can help and get involved in the topic that their investigative work focuses on. He says this will need to be thought out carefully as the bureau is non-partisan / political in its stance. And he stresses that user needs can evolve and change depending on how content performs. ‘They don’t stand still,’ he adds.
The FT Strategies report, ‘The User Needs Model: Driving Relevance, Resonance and Revenue in Modern Newsrooms’, can be downloaded from here.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
