Over the past two posts, I've been building toward something. While I’m speaking through the lens of local news specifically, much of this is still applicable to other organizations.

In post one, I wrote about audience loops. That’s the idea that we need to move from one-way broadcasting to continuous listening and response…and fast.

In post two, I introduced the user needs model. An audience loop is only useful if you know what you're trying to learn in the first place.

Both of those posts were essentially about systems. The system isn’t broken. But the audience they were built for HAS.

Most newsrooms already have data. Analytics dashboards. Audience surveys. Research decks that get presented at industry conferences and then quietly filed away.

The gap is most definitely NOT information. It's what happens before any of that. It’s in the moment someone decides what to work on, what to assign, what to greenlight, what counts as done.

That moment is governed almost entirely by the questions a team habitually asks. And in most newsrooms, those questions sound like: What's happening? What should we cover? How fast can we move?

These are output questions. They produce a certain kind of work, reliably and efficiently, every single time. They've also been the right questions for a long time. The problem is that the market shifted and the measures didn't. And those questions are almost entirely silent on the audience.

There's a different question that changes the starting point for all of it: What problem are we trying to solve?

Whether you’re trying to solve for a client, the audience, or the internal team…this question can sound small. It isn't.

Because when you ask it, really ask it and require a specific answer, a few things happen immediately.

Vague ideas get exposed. "We should cover the city council meeting" is not an answer. "People don't understand how the new zoning vote will affect their neighborhood" is an answer. Those two starting points produce completely different work.

Success becomes measurable in human terms. If the problem is "people are confused about what this policy means for them," you now have a way to evaluate whether you did your job, not just whether you hit the deadline. And the audience becomes a stakeholder in the decision, not an afterthought to the distribution plan.

This is where the Magid research landed for me. Their diagnosis was sharp: local news isn't losing relevance, it's losing fit with how audiences allocate attention. Fit is a design problem. And you can't design for an audience you haven't named, with a problem you haven't articulated.

The research is clarifying. But it stops at the diagnosis. It tells us audiences want context over speed, passion over volume and meaning over information delivery. What it doesn't tell us is what question to ask in the room before any of that can happen, or why the existing approaches are so hard to unwire.

None of this is about effort. The people inside these organizations are some of the hardest working in any industry. The issue is that the effort is aimed at a target that's quietly moved, and that's no one's fault individually.

Breaking news culture isn't just a workflow. It's an identity. The speed, the instinct, the status of being first, these aren't habits you swap out with a better framework. They're wired into how people understand their own value, and they've been rewarded for it, rightly, for years.

So when you introduce a question that, at face value, slows things down, even usefully, the resistance isn't laziness or stubbornness. It's that the question bumps up against something people have built real expertise and real careers around.

The goal isn't to dismantle urgency. It's to aim it better.

Here's what makes this hard to say out loud: If our industry is optimized for volume, and volume is what gets measured, rewarded, and sold then the system is doing exactly what it was built to do.

It's not failing. It's succeeding at the wrong goal. And that means the fix isn't a new tool, a better dashboard, or a smarter workflow.

It means asking whether the goal itself needs to change.

That's not a technology problem or even a strategy problem. It's a question problem. And it starts with the smallest possible shift from what should we publish? to what problem are we solving?

Those two questions produce different work, different metrics, and ultimately different organizations.

The uncomfortable part isn't the question. It's realizing we already know the answer and that changing it requires more than a new strategy deck.

🔒 For subscribers: one concrete thing to try this week that requires no buy-in or meetings.