Today (April 9) is Local News Day. If you’re not familiar, it’s a national day of action meant to reconnect people with trusted local news, highlighting the role local journalism plays in keeping communities informed, connected and accountable.
It isn’t prescriptive by design. Newsrooms are encouraged to participate “in any way that feels authentic” and experiment with engagement.
The most common approaches I’ve observed:
Promotion + awareness
A lot of orgs are doing the expected things because we have the workflow to execute fairly easily:
Social posts about why local news matters
On-site banners (“support local journalism”)
Newsletter pushes / subscription asks
Community events
Some organizations are going more experiential:
Journalists + community members meeting in person for conversation
Newsroom tours, local partnerships, even restaurant tie-ins designed to bring people physically closer to the newsroom
This is the closest thing to true listening environments happening at scale.
Engagement campaigns & incentives
Some orgs are trying to drive action:
Merchandise giveaways
Matching campaigns (subscriptions/donations)
Partner activations with local businesses
These are about conversion and support, not necessarily insight.
Expanding on the concept
A few weeks ago, when I first saw a post on LinkedIn about Local News Day, I immediately became interested in learning more. I noticed a reply on the post from someone with deep roots in local journalism commenting about it not just being a day to say “yay, local news” but that it was an opportunity to have conversations with our audience.
Given that product thinking is rooted in audience insights, of course, that scratched an itch in my brain. I started thinking about more high-impact ways to execute.
Local News Day is a great moment to celebrate the work. It's also a perfect moment to ask a harder question: How well do we actually listen and what do we do with what we hear? Of course, this assumes we value the audience and being that serving the community is the stated mission, this is an area that you should want to get better at.
Listening isn't a strategy. It's a practice.
Most newsrooms would say they listen to their audience. And they're not wrong. Bigger newsrooms have consultants leading research efforts. We also have surveys, comments, support tickets, emails.
But having inputs isn't the same as having a system.
The inputs sit in inboxes or PowerPoint decks. They get mentioned in a meeting. Then they fade.
Meanwhile, some of the richest audience insight in any organization isn't captured in a survey — it's in the daily experience of the people closest to readers:
The person answering emails.
The team working support tickets.
The staff at community events.
The digital producer reading replies on social media.
These people hear confusion before it shows up in your data. They hear frustration before it becomes churn. They hear patterns before they become trends.
And they hear the range, not just the loudest voices or complaints about bias.
What they are learning is incredibly valuable. And often chronically underused. It’s definitely not something organizations are having managers sit in rooms to hear about for hours at a time.
Why the gap exists
A lot of newsrooms inherited a specific model of audience research: consultant-led, highly structured, delivered once or twice a year.
That work has real value. But it has limits.
It's expensive. It captures a moment in time. It's not always drawn from your actual audience. And it misses the constant stream of signal that your organization generates every single day.
To be clear, I'm not anti-research AT ALL. I grew up with a science teacher dad. We did science projects on the weekend. I find comfort in methodology. I've taken graduate level research classes. I’ve successfully submitted a proposal to an Institutional Review Board (IRB) before I start collecting data from people. With my roots in journalism, I also know how easily bias creeps in if you're not careful.
But no survey can capture what your frontline team hears every week, and right now, that knowledge mostly lives in people's heads and disappears.
What an audience loop actually is
An audience loop isn't complicated. It's just a system for turning listening into action:
Ask or observe intentionally
Capture what you're hearing
Identify patterns over time
Apply it to decisions
Close the loop with your audience
Then repeat. The repetition is what makes it valuable. One of the most underappreciated things about this: it changes the nature of internal conversations.
When you consistently bring audience insight into the room, you stop negotiating opinion vs. opinion. You start anchoring decisions to real, observable needs. Priorities become clearer. Tradeoffs become easier to explain.
You're not just defending ideas or feelings or assumptions, you're connecting them to the people you serve.
Up next, a simple way to get started.