Khalil is an advocate for audiences-driven approaches in the media industry. He consults, advises, and mentors teams and individuals at media organisations worldwide, helping them shape stronger, more connected societies, focusing mainly on user needs, product work and AI.
In this article, Khalil summarises his session at The Audiencers' Festival London 2025 where he interviewed Oliver Kemp on his work on user needs at TBIJ.
The media industry is struggling. Digital and print audiences are shrinking, layoffs are mounting, and trust in journalists is plummeting worldwide. You’ve seen this story unfold.
But look closer and you’ll find rays of hope – rays that are growing brighter. Because, beyond the industry malaise, a subset of media operations is thriving.
I’ve studied some of these successful operations for several years and found one fundamental factor that unites them: their ability to connect (or reconnect) with people … with their audiences. They serve people’s needs with quality, trustworthy journalism that is genuinely valuable. And because they consistently provide value, people forge real connections with them.
The key insight here is: serving people’s needs. Today’s successful media operations understand that addressing the needs of audiences underpins everything. And many achieve this by integrating the user needs model into their operations.
One media operation that has implemented the user needs model successfully is The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) in the UK. For TBIJ, it’s not about clicks – it has no shareholder to please – it’s about depth and transparency. Its mission is to hold power to account.
Oliver Kemp, TBIJ’s Audience Editor, led the model’s newsroom implementation. When I interviewed him at The Audiencers’ Festival in London, he shared valuable insights about the journey and critical factors for successfully rolling out user needs in a newsroom.
> Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing user needs in a newsroom of any size.
TBIJ’s unique set of user needs
Integrating user needs opened new pathways for TBIJ to provide value to people. While its core journalism seeks to show abuses of power, talking directly to its audiences convinced Oliver and team that there are opportunities to provide more value by serving more needs.
This led them to create their own user needs model – one deeply representative of their audiences’ needs and fully aligned with TBIJ’s mission.
Creating a unique model helps bring a newsroom closer to its audiences. Beyond exposing abuses of power, TBIJ now aims to help people discover and learn about complex topics (often related to their investigations); involve people by being transparent about their journalistic process; and spark people into realising the good journalism can do by showing the real-world impact of their work.
A unique model can also win over more ambivalent colleagues for two reasons:
- Collectivity: creating the unique model offers an opportunity to bring colleagues along in the process. Oliver highlighted how he addressed scepticism and fostered stronger ownership of the final model.
- Relatability: the unique user needs tend to align closely with the operation’s mission, making them more relatable to colleagues and improving acceptance.
💡 “The first step is to talk directly to your audience … These conversations can take many forms – surveys, interviews, focus groups, or even informal chats – but the goal is the same: to hear in their own words what they value, what they struggle to find elsewhere, and how your journalism can serve them better. This insight becomes the foundation for tailoring the model to fit your unique context.”
Creating a unique model requires considerable work and initial good faith from decision-makers, as results don’t typically appear in the short-term. This is why most media operations aren’t best-placed to create a unique model when beginning to implement user needs. For most operations, allocating resources is a constant battle, and the need to show results quickly is essential for future investment.
Using the plug-and-play user needs model is a perfect starting point for most operations, with creating a unique model more feasible when they are ready to double down on user needs.
Acting on the user needs
With the model in place, it’s time to identify how well (or not!) the newsroom is currently serving the user needs. The aims are to create a reference for gauging the impact of user needs-informed journalism, and to understand which user needs to prioritise (and deprioritise).
For most media operations, TBIJ included, the content audit forms the bulk of this work. The audit involves tagging hundreds of recently-published content with the user need each serves.
Once the tagging is completed, the charts that change everything can be generated. These charts are the artefacts that will convince colleagues to take action. They showcase:
- The reference: how a media operation’s content currently serves user needs.
- The actions to take: where mismatches exist between content production and serving user needs.
Note: the chart is for illustrative purposes only, but it mirrors findings from many media operations that conduct content audits.
As you can see, doing the content audit, and subsequent analysis, can be a painstaking process. But it is of utmost importance. The insights from the audit forms the basis of every downstream decision.
User needs at the basis of strategy
Oliver shared how user needs now informs TBIJ’s content and engagement strategies, leading to even better journalism and growing audiences.
- More needs, better served: TBIJ tracks the volume of content it produces for each user need and identifies those that may be under-served. This informs content strategy, enabling them to act strategically to rebalance content production with user needs.
- Increase exposure of their investigations: certain themes and user needs are more accessible to specific target audiences than others. Reframing some investigative work around these creates more accessible entry points for more people.
- Increase engagement with their journalism: while certain user needs make good entry points, others suit deeper engagement or conversions. Understanding the user funnel through user needs, using tools like Poool’s Engage element, opens up possibilities for better-optimised user experiences.
User needs also became the basis for identifying both missed and new opportunities at TBIJ.
The “spark” user need has untapped potential, according to Oliver. To better inspire audiences about the impact good journalism can have, reframing this need so it more clearly guides TBIJ’s work may be on the cards.
This illustrates the evolving nature of user needs. It’s necessary to frequently revisit the model and iterate to remain close to audiences and aligned with the media operation’s purpose. Audiences’ needs, interests, behaviours, and the problems they face all change over time. And sometimes, it may be worth adjusting certain user needs to make them more actionable within newsrooms. The point is we must continually adapt to remain valuable.
Oliver also revealed that a fifth user need may be in the works at TBIJ – one that would be explicitly action-oriented. This speaks to extensive research showing that people seek information that helps them do something about what’s happening. There may well be an opportunity to serve this need by engaging people more directly with investigations, whether through participation or advocacy.
When user needs leads to culture change
Culture change can seem impossible – it’s hard and takes time. But at some point, it becomes inevitable.
Oliver knew TBIJ had reached this point when reporters started pitching ideas with user needs already in mind. No longer was user needs something they ticked off at the end of the process. Now, user needs directly shaped their journalism. Reporters were thinking about the “why” (need to serve) and “who” (target audience) of a story from conception.
💡 “[Reporters] identified whether [their stories] would meet a need to inform, explain, inspire, or provoke action, and tailoring their approach accordingly. This not only produced stronger, more focused ideas, but also fostered a more collaborative editorial culture, where conversations about audience and impact became part of the creative process rather than an afterthought.”
This is the culmination of a user needs-first newsroom – where the virtuous cycle of value, quality, trust, and connection is fully activated to provide journalism that is genuinely valuable to people.
> Download all slides from Khalil & Oliver’s session here
