Blocking out the audience’s siren song

When Fox News pushed back on the lies that the U.S. presidential election in 2020 was “stolen,” viewers flocked to far-right outlets like OAN and Newsmax. As the Dominion Voting System’s lawsuit against Fox News showed, people inside Fox News were so nervous about losing parts of their audience that they caved and gave the audience what they wanted: more lies.

The more a media outlet caters to its audience, the more it becomes dependent on its audience. This is especially true in a hypercompetitive media market in which the audience’s attention is a scarce resource. And the impact of audiences — often measured through data analytics such as clicks, shares, and likes — can impact the story’s position on the website and whether to produce similar stories. These analytics affect a media outlet’s agenda and can make or break careers.

This dependence on audiences is one risk of newsrooms’ reliance on audiences to finance their business models. Newsrooms cater to what audiences want more than what they need.

The other risk of this audience-driven business model, facticity, stems from news value research which, in short, concerns the factors that make an event newsworthy or not. Facticity is the idea that some events are more newsworthy than others simply because of what they are. An earthquake, for example, has a high facticity rating because it is immediate, it is drastic, and we can easily understand it. Climate change, on the other hand, has a low facticity rating because it is complex, slowly developing (climate, after all, is the average weather over 30 years), and hard to pinpoint. And while extreme weather events “help” climate change coverage because of their facticity, most stories surrounding climate change are abstract and complex and hard to pitch. Indeed, this is an issue that climate change journalists have been struggling with since the 1980s: How can we report on a topic that affects everyone but has a terrible news value?

My former professor once remarked that the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung didn’t care about its audience — but this wasn’t meant as a bad thing. This was not to say that they did not appreciate their audience, but rather that the publication wrote stories that they thought needed to be told and not the stories that their audience wanted to read. That was in the late 2000s, at the early stages of analytics-informed journalism. Journalists today should adopt this approach to their audiences.

In 2025, news organizations will hear the audience’s siren song louder and clearer than ever before. Journalists will wrestle with abandoning Twitter/X — and the audiences they built there — for Bluesky. They will worry about the drop in engagement for their stories as the algorithms for platforms like Twitter/X and Threads do not reward linking to outside sources. And they will hear the audience’s siren call when they look at the analytics of their latest stories.

But if the audience’s attention affects editorial decision-making, then we need to come to terms with the fact that the audience does not necessarily know what’s good for it. Instead, journalists need to consider what their audiences need.

The far-right administration that will take over the U.S. will undoubtedly produce scandal after scandal. If the first four years of the Trump presidency were not evidence enough, just look to the last few weeks after the 2024 election, whether it was nominating Matt Gaetz for attorney general or apparently jokingly offering to annex Canada as the 51st state. The next four years will be full of stories that are full of facticity and that audiences will consume — a boon for journalists’ analytics.

But most governance — even extreme governance — is banal. If Project 2025 is anything to go by, journalists need to focus more on the boring minutiae of policymaking and not on the sensationalism of politics. For that, journalists need to borrow from climate journalists to learn how to cover an extremely important event that most people don’t care about. They need to cover their ears to the audience’s siren song and publish what the audience needs to know — even if readers aren’t interested.