“The future of journalism isn’t AI. It’s the audience. And it always has been.”
Adriana Lacy really hit the nail on the head with this statement. As she highlighted in a LinkedIn post, for too long, we’ve treated audiences as the end of our work rather than the beginning. We’ve measured their engagement without genuinely engaging with them and analyzed their data without truly understanding their needs.
The solution lies in shifting from a content-centric approach, where the end goal is publication, to an audience-centric one, where the focus is on impact. This means nurturing the middle of the funnel, or as Sarah Marshall calls it, the happy middle—the space between a casual visitor and a loyal, paying reader.
Unlike the fly-by visitor, these readers have repeated, meaningful interactions with your brand. They consume more, contribute to higher lifetime value and even advocate to bring others to discover your work.
