A question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I, or the others, crazy?
By : Albert Einstein

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
By : Albert Einstein

Wisdom is not the product of schooling, but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
By : Albert Einstein

The problem? Designers and editors both know that what people say they care about is often different than how they actually behave. Behavior is influenced by many factors, all of which may change over the course of a day (or week, or year). Readers may say they want more stories about municipal water treatment because they know that’s a “good” thing to say — or even because they genuinely intend to sit down and learn about water safety. But after the survey, when the editor runs analytics, she’ll see that people still click far more often on stories about BTS, not water treatment

But many outlets — especially those that aren’t investigative-driven — don’t have nearly as clear a grasp on the why of their audience: “Why does our audience think we matter?” And underlying that: “What do our readers need from journalism? In what ways do they rely on us to meet that need? Is our publication demonstrably changing readers’ understanding or behavior? How do we know?”

“I’m creating something I really believe has value. But — does it? I can’t really

At the summit, I spent one lunch session chatting with a writer who is building a health and parenting newsletter for her regional readership. “I’m creating something I really believe has value,” she told me. “But — does it? I can’t really tell.”

People were reading her newsletter; thanks to increasingly-sophisticated analytics tools, journalists and publications can tell a lot about reader behavior. Her data could tell her who was reading, what content they opened, how much of it they read, how many times, at what times of day, on what platform, and whether they passed it on to others.

But what the data wasn’t telling her was why they were reading it—and what impact, if any, it was having on them.

A service delivers something of value that people cannot provide for themselves. For an industry that describes itself as a service, this inability to evaluate its own success is a fairly large miss.

User-Centered Service: Understanding Need + Access
It is conventional editorial wisdom that understanding reader preference is a necessity — so in addition to tracking analytics, editors will often try to capture readers’ tastes by asking them, via reader surveys.

Confusing Service with Mission
Like design, journalism is in the business of delivering “the data + the why” of human behavior. Publications tend to have clear and thoughtful mission statements that answer the why of their work: “Why do we think journalism matters?” And therefore: “What kind of stories do we think should we tell?” And, “How is our content unique from others’ content?”

Hmmmmmm