What do Audience Teams know about change? (a lot)
How managing change has taught a generation to contend with uncertainty
By J. Gabriel Boylan
Introduction
Every area of news media has had to adapt to seismic shifts in society’s relationship with news over the past few years—diminishing trust, changes to search algorithms, news fatigue, continuing erosion of social media referral traffic, the threat of AI. But one group of media professionals is no stranger to change: audience teams. Change is a constant for audience work, which relies on using technology to find readers and develop relationships with them. As ways of reading, listening, and viewing change, audience teams adapt, and lead.
What is audience work? Quite simply, audience teams have the job of helping the news reach the people—of growing and maintaining the audience. The work sits at the intersection of editorial, product, marketing, communications and PR—at the center of a Venn diagram of every part of a media organization, really. Audience teams manage newsletters, run promotions, write social posts, track data and analytics, manage communities, brainstorm ways to boost subscriptions. At some publications, they write and test headlines. They might be consulted by editors about what subjects the publication’s audience is hungriest to know about and what kinds of stories do best. They might facilitate community engagement, including events. They are constantly tinkering, testing, experimenting, looking at the latest thing, and looking again at the old thing to see whether it’s working; avant garde and rearguard.
The questions are endless: Are we prioritizing newsletters or podcasts, longform features or TikTok engagement, Reddit or more direct community engagement? Should we quit Bluesky or double down? Are all these long-term SEO projects going to matter when Google changes the rules (again) in six months? Are the people we hired adaptable to a changing environment—and changing duties—or are they going to churn out and go to law school? Are we doing enough to get people excited about donating/membership? Does leadership understand how external forces are changing our relationship to the public? Does leadership expect us to conjure another viral moment out of thin air?
Viral conjuring notwithstanding, working with never-ending change can create incredible challenges to determining long-term strategy, sticking to annual or even quarterly goals, keeping in step with leadership expectations, and managing a team. So how do audience professionals manage that continuous barrage of shifts, reversals, surprises, and catastrophes? Having worked in audience for some time, I have had to reckon with all of these questions, and many more, and had my own ideas, techniques, and strategies for managing change, informed by my particular places of employment, contexts, and goals. I’ve developed a kind of second sense for how to adapt intelligently, rely on data to make informed decisions, communicate effectively with every part of the organization, hire with an assumption that roles will evolve quickly and constantly, and be a leader who can bring all of this sensibility to bear on organization-wide decisions. I wanted to know how others had weathered these storms in recent months and years, and throughout their careers. Despite years of experience, I still had questions:
How do audience leaders estimate growth or engagement numbers when they don’t know how the coming year will change how audiences discover, access, or pay for content? How do they stay ahead of change?
How do they manage their teams when platforms are always emerging, rising, falling, disappearing, or turning for or against media in shorter cycles?
How do they communicate effectively with management to set expectations without making promises they can’t keep?
How do they future-proof, even in short timeframes, for an unstable and unknowable future?
All these questions brought me to the world of change management. This is a discourse and way of thinking about overall transformations that businesses or organizations undergo when confronted with changing markets, changing audiences, and changing societies. Imagine a chemical company that was once very strong but is using outdated technology, is faced with aggressive foreign competition, and is slow to bring new products to market. Change management is the process by which that chemical company reinvents itself—its workflows, organizational structure, and approach to innovation—to address its weaknesses, strengthen its position for the future, and survive the market shift. I wanted to know if change management could be a useful way to approach the changes that audience teams have to weather, and if audience managers were already utilizing change management strategies, even if they might call their techniques something else.
I spoke with several audience professionals, as well as media leaders who had worked in audience, about how they’ve managed a changing external environment and maintained successful initiatives that grow and engage audiences. I asked them how they are able to meet the goals of their organizations—maintaining relationships with existing readers and discovering new ones—while retaining the flexibility to pivot, reset expectations and goals, adapt workflows, and handle staffing challenges. I asked them to reflect on how the leadership at their companies have understood audience, and whether they have the freedom to flex, experiment, test, and re-test. And I asked them directly how they manage change. Their answers were strongly aligned with some of the fundamentals of change management.
In what follows, I am confident that audience professionals—or anyone looking to navigate the changing media landscape—will find a useful toolbox of best practices and guiding principles. It is my hope that people who work in audience will begin to think about change management as integral to what they do, and that such awareness will help them more deeply understand the challenges they face, and guide them to make better, more informed decisions. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or fumble towards these outcomes; knowing the theory can guide the practice. But I must stress that anyone who works in the media will benefit from thinking about audience. Audience, after all, is nothing less than the way that the stories get to the people. The best stories in the world won’t matter if no one reads them.
Change Management
The process of audience development in media mirrors that of organizational change. To effectively reach and engage new audiences while maintaining existing ones in the face of a changing society, media organizations need to adopt new technologies, revise content strategies, and even shift organizational culture. Understanding and applying the principles of change management theory is crucial for navigating these transformations successfully. There are hundreds of works out there on the concept of change management, and many models (Lewin's Three-Step Model, the ADKAR Model, the McKinsey 7-S Model, Bridges' Transition Model, and more), but for the purposes of this project, I’ll focus on two particularly influential iterations of that thinking: Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations theory and John Kotter's 8-Step Model of change management. Here’s a quick guide to those works.
Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations theory, which grew out of his work in sociology and communication theory starting in the early 1960s, provides one of the original frameworks for understanding how innovations spread through a social system over time. It’s been applied to business transformations in various forms and is a leading concept underlying much change management strategy today. The theory focuses on the characteristics of the innovation, the communication channels used, the time involved in the adoption process, and the nature of the social system.
Key elements of this theory include:
Innovation Attributes: The characteristics of an innovation as perceived by potential adopters, influencing the rate of adoption:
Relative advantage: Is this new thing actually better than what we're doing now?
Compatibility: Does it fit with our existing values and the way we do things?
Complexity: How hard is it to understand and use?
Trialability: Can we try it out on a small scale first?
Observability: Can we easily see the results of using it?
Stages in the Adoption Process:
Initiation: Recognizing a problem (agenda-setting) and finding an innovation to address it (matching).
Implementation: Adapting the innovation to fit the organization (redefinition/restructuring), making its meaning clearer as more people use it (clarifying), and eventually making it a routine part of work (routinizing).
While Rogers’ work is more popular in corporate leadership, its applicability to audience work is clear to anyone who has worked in the field. Audience teams need to prove the advantages of their interventions through data; make the case for their work enhancing, rather than distracting from, the core work of their outlet; make their work comprehensible to the larger team; test (so much testing!); and broadcast the results to get the whole organization, or at least key stakeholders, involved in the innovation. The stages of adoption are also uncannily familiar to audience professionals, who find creative solutions to pressing problems from well outside established workflows and routines, and not only make the case for their value and impact but have to bring other parts of the organization into the effort—often the most challenging part of innovation.
John Kotter continued to elaborate on such concepts, first with “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” which appeared in a 1995 issue of the Harvard Business Review, and the book that followed, Leading Change, a year later. Kotter’s work in Leading Change and its many follow-ups, particularly 2002’s The Heart of Change and 2014’s Accelerate, have had arguably the most far-reaching impact on corporate change management thinking in the past 30 years.
Kotter’s 8-Step Model provides a sequential approach to managing change, though more recent versions, like the model described in his book Accelerate, emphasizes running these steps concurrently and continuously in today's "warp-speed world.” That’s the version to keep in mind for how audience teams reflect the steps of his theory.
The eight steps are:
Create a Sense of Urgency: Establish good reasons for change by focusing on a significant and time-sensitive opportunity that resonates with both the reason and emotions of the people within the organization. In short, people need to be excited about a chance to reinvigorate their workplace.
Build a Guiding Coalition: This step entails gathering a diverse and influential group of individuals from all levels of the organization who are committed to the change initiative: These are your leaders and your cheerleaders.
Develop a Strategic Vision: This is where the guiding coalition creates a clear, inspiring, and communicable model of the desired future: how the company will change to make the most of the opportunity identified in the first step. This model requires a roadmap of activities to make this vision a reality, validated by senior leaders.
Communicate and Enlist a Volunteer Army: This is where the cheerleading comes in, ensuring there’s a group (roughly 15% of the organization) who "want to" contribute to executing the initiatives linked to the strategic vision, rather than feeling they "have to." Giving people a choice to step forward is key to ensuring the work will get done.
Enable Action by Removing Barriers: To allow the volunteer army to make real impact, leaders must identify and remove obstacles to innovation such as inefficient processes, archaic norms, silos, and limited access to key stakeholders. It’s also key to be sure the volunteers have bandwidth to achieve their goals.
Generate Short-Term Wins: Wins, both big and small, serve as tangible evidence of progress and help to energize the volunteers and track the transformation's story in quantifiable and qualifiable terms. This provides further motivation and concrete proof of the effort’s results.
Consolidate/Sustain Acceleration: After initial successes, it's crucial to use that momentum to further fuel change by improving systems, structures, and policies. It’s the fuel for continued urgency. This phase builds organizational fitness and stamina.
Institute/Anchor Change: The final step involves anchoring the new approaches in the organization's culture to ensure long-term success of new initiatives and workflows. Cultural change comes after successfully altering people's actions and connecting new behaviors with better performance.
The case studies in Kotter’s work all come from the corporate world and mainly focus on companies who were able to endure major shifts in consumer habits, natural resource availability, technological and manufacturing advancements, foreign competition, and so on. (Take the chemical company example; it’s staggering how some companies have managed to reinvent themselves when faced with extinction.) Yet if you look at all eight steps and consider them as accompanying a shift to using a new social platform, or creating new multimedia news delivery formats, or focusing on community building, or reorganizing work to address changes in search algorithms, they feel perfectly at home.
Applying to Media Audience Development
Ten or fifteen years ago, it was hard to find someone who had worked for very long in audience development in the media. There were a few seasoned social media managers, but most of them were housed in larger departments like marketing, communications, or editorial, rather than standalone teams, so their seniority had a ceiling. Today there are thousands of folks working in the field. They are audience editors, directors, VPs, and more.
From speaking with peers in the field over the years I know we share the same worries, headaches, and unending quest for solutions. For this project I have chosen to speak with a group of seasoned audience professionals, as well as media leaders who have worked in audience previously, with a wide lens covering nonprofit, for-profit, large, small, news-focused and lifestyle publishing. This selection is very intentional. I want to get a strong sense of what strategies, techniques, and approaches share common attributes across these various types of organizations. Audience work depends, of course, on audiences, and they vary as much as these organizations vary in size, subject matter, cost, social status, and so on. Yet what I want to highlight are philosophical approaches to handling external change that don’t lose focus on larger organizational goals and needs.
All the people I spoke with touched upon the core principles of change management discussed above by outlining practical strategies for adaptation, communication, data utilization, experimentation, and supporting teams through disruption. I have noted the crossovers, but they should become apparent quickly. I hope you find them useful in your work!
Principle 1: Constant Adaptation is a Core Competency.
The external environment for media audiences is not merely changing; it is in a state of constant, often unpredictable, flux. This reality necessitates that adaptation and flexibility become fundamental skills for individuals and core competencies for organizations. Audience professionals, by the very nature of their work, have long been at the forefront of this need for continuous reinvention. To them, Kotter’s first step, “Create a sense of urgency,” as it relates to generating excitement and immediacy to the larger organization, is implicit in much of their daily work. Platforms rise and fall and rise again, formats are constantly being invented and reinvented, and as audience behaviors shift and evolve quickly, teams need to be constantly alert to those shifts and evolutions. In addition to urgency, this rule relates closely to Kotter’s step of removing barriers, generating short-term wins, and sustaining acceleration. Audience professionals must live and breathe urgency, cut through the old ways and show evidence of the value of their interventions, and work to spur organization-wide changes in workflows and tasks.
Alexandra Smith, chief strategy officer at The 19th, and formerly head of audience operations for that publication and others, put succinctly how adaptation forms the core of audience work:
Conversations in audience team meetings were always around what's changing and what's going on around us, and that was just a natural part of the work and we were always pretty open and eager to figure it out together.
Smith noted that audience thinking naturally centers around outcomes, a key ingredient to adaptation since it’s focused not simply on the latest bright shiny thing, but on making smart trade-offs to make the most of where readers are getting information, engaging with publications, and pushing the definition of “getting the news” outside of traditional platforms and formats. She gave a strong example, both of creating urgency and removing barriers, from her time working at a New Jersey publication following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012:
I had to convince leadership to use Facebook and Facebook groups to distribute basic community needs information. Because that's where I saw people discussing things like, ‘Where can I find gas?’ ‘Where can I charge my phone?’ ‘Where can I pick up meds?’ And so I had to convince leadership to make this big pivot from just putting out quickly outdated need-to-know info in an article page to us posting in Facebook groups.
The pace of change can be incredibly rapid. Rubina Fillion, who worked in audience for The Intercept and the New York Times Opinion section, and now is part of the Times’ AI Initiatives team, contrasted changes in audience work with the speed of AI development, stating:
I think the most important thing for audience editors and for those who work in AI is just to be extremely flexible and be willing to change your strategy at any time, given the data that you are presented with. AI moves extremely quickly, even more quickly than audience. Changes would happen over months or years in audience. That can happen in days in AI.
Fillion went on to note that people working in audience are uniquely attuned to notice and learn about what others are doing, what’s working for other newsrooms, and where innovations can be adopted or played with and reinvented. This speaks to the steps of creating urgency, generating short-term wins, and sustaining acceleration:
There's only so much you can learn within your own newsroom. When I was an adjunct at Columbia and NYU, I always made sure to tell my students, “You need to look outside of your own newsroom.” This is incredibly important: going to industry events, reading Nieman Lab, or talking to people that are doing the same job at other places. Otherwise you are just restricting your ability to grow as a person professionally. It's just, it's so important. And then if you're looking outside of your newsroom, you can see what everyone else is trying and what worked and what didn't. And then you're saving yourself a ton of time, too. Getting out there and learning and then sharing it with your team is really kind of like a survival technique, right? Otherwise you're just going to be kind of playing in your own sandbox.
The need for rapid assessment and strategic pivots, often even in anticipation of shifts, is now universal across the media industry. Ryan Kellett, who worked in audience at The Washington Post, Axios, and other outlets, highlighted this necessity as a mandate from leadership:
[My manager] was like, ‘The reason you are here, right, is so that I don't get an email from the publisher with a link to some random Digiday article that says, ‘Are we on this?!?!’
Kellett also spoke about the needs for adaptability being second nature to audience teams:
Pretty much every two years, you basically need to turn over and redesign your audience organization, because that's the only way to keep up if you wanna be innovative. You have to design a system of people and feedback to get you information as fast as possible and to talk about that and process it and figure out what is our piece of this. You almost always need to be feeding a change into the system. You have to be willing to say, “This is not the moment for this,” but you also have opportunity: Let's test a liveblog tool, because Ukraine news happens every single day. Let's try it.
This demonstrates a direct demand from the top for someone to proactively monitor and respond to external changes, preventing reactive scrambling. It speaks to urgency, the “volunteer army,” removing barriers, short-term wins, and sustained acceleration. For anyone in media, this means being prepared to, as Kellett put it, "tear up the playbook" quickly when assumptions about platform efficacy, audience behavior, or traffic sources are invalidated by new data or external shifts, implicitly drawn from the need to adapt quickly based on data. Bryan Groves, now interim publisher at The New Republic and a veteran audience leader, echoed this sentiment, saying “you've got to throw everything at the wall” when it comes to grabbing and keeping audiences. Groves gave a great example of a small change that made a huge difference to The New Republic podcast:
I would have never guessed in August of 2024, when we started this podcast, that by December, the best thing we would do is throw a transcript [on the website], and that that's where all the money is going to come from, to pay for the podcast. I told the host, “People love to read your podcast.” And he's like, “Um, what do you mean?” So I keep telling our editor that we need more transcript-type interviews. It's quick, it's easy, it works.
Joyce Tang, editorial director of audience for New York Magazine, had a more nuanced take, stressing that while adaptability is critical, constant pivots are not usually where long-term success lies:
Managing team adaptability is actually a huge challenge. You need people with strategic, nimble, flexible thinking to understand the vastly different needs of audiences on platforms like, say, Pinterest versus Twitter. It's hard to find people who can toggle across that whole spectrum, and most companies lack the budget to hire specialists for every platform. Everything changes all the time. It's not about one exact moment; you just have to slowly move that needle over time. We have to acknowledge that platforms will do what they do, keep up best practices, but not expect [any one of] them to be the future of our audience.
This viewpoint addresses the challenge of the somewhat unreliable relationship that publications can have with potential readers; accepting that the relationship will be inconsistent requires a fundamentally flexible approach to engaging audiences wherever they are and however they are consuming content. This hews closer to Kotter’s original concept of creating change, and speaks to the strategic vision necessary to carry the process forward.
Zainab Shah, a veteran of audience work (BuzzFeed, The Correspondent, The City) who currently works for the American Journalism Project advising startup publications on strategy and audience, shared an anecdote about embracing change to actively support core activities:
At The City they were relentlessly investigating the Adams administration, and it really led to [impact]. But the thing that converted the most newsletter subscribers was stories about composting and how composting in New York City works. We all know that newsletter subscribers convert to paid members; at The City it was 10%. And the investigations were expensive. They take a lot of money, a lot of resources and they're prestigious, right? People are like, "Love it." But not a lot of people are reading it. The composting stories? So many more people read then, and so many more people converted.
Experimentation is great, and is a necessary component of addressing changes, but if it’s all only urgency, only short-term wins, the path forward is no clearer than it ever was. Being adaptable means grabbing an emerging trend and running with it or sticking with something based on your instinct that it will endure or, in some cases, balancing both.
Principle 2: Data is the key to fueling change
Audience professionals have historically been deeply engaged with data, driven by the need to prove value and understand complex digital ecosystems beyond simple metrics. As Bryan Groves of The New Republic puts it, in today's media landscape, you "better work off data or we're not going to be around.” Using data to make the best decisions ties in with numerous steps in Kotter’s theory. Data can make the case for urgency, can help unite a coalition behind needed changes, inform any strategic vision behind change, and recommend where barriers can be removed to sprint forward. It’s also the key differentiator in change movements that succeed in transforming organizational behaviors permanently, the final step. At its best, data can form the basis for a story that can be shared, a story with clear takeaways that can help direct teams to the next move, the next chapter in the larger story. But in today’s world, many media organizations are flooded with data points, so sorting through and extracting that story to find a path to actionable intel is key.
One of the biggest changes for how media organizations treat data in recent years has been the expansion of the view from owned platforms (website/app pageviews and users) to the "total audience" across a multitude of external spaces (newsletter, social platforms, events, podcasts). Even at organizations where pageviews, and subsequent ad impressions, remain key business priorities, success is no longer measured purely by traffic to one's own website; it involves understanding how people consume journalism across various platforms and how to maximize engagement in all spaces.
Alexandra Smith of the 19th spoke about establishing new metrics that look more to total audience engagements than granular metrics varying by platform, as she wrote about in Columbia Journalism Review in 2024. She explained this change in metrics to me:
We decided to develop this roll-up metric: very simple, not weighted. I always tell everyone: “It's not about perfect data science. It's not about measuring our unique audience size—that would be impossible right now across platforms. It's really more of a culture change tool. Here's all the places where people are consuming our journalism.” And then we also had a lot of conversations about what it actually means to consume our journalism. And we revisit that regularly. So for example, last year we did a limited-run podcast and we're like, “Okay, this is our journalism—talking about a specific story every week or every two weeks. We think it should be included. So we'll include it.” This year we don’t have podcast listens or downloads in our metric because we don't have a podcast. So I think that being nimble and flexible, and showing that to staff, has been disarming, too. That we don't have all the answers right now. We won't pretend. It's going to change."
Audience professionals are typically obsessive about data because they know that real narratives about how their work is landing only emerge from looking at multiple data points and collecting them into a story. But with so many data points coming in from so many different platforms, how does one sift through it all? Zainab Shah of American Journalism Project put it this way:
I deal with data all the time, and I think the one thing to be mindful of is “data drowning.” One team I [worked with] had 240-something segments in HubSpot, and I'm like “We don't need that many segments. We have 12,000 users!” There's a lot of tracking for the sake of tracking, but not knowing what to do with the numbers. I think that a lot of people still find it challenging to make the connection between what's an insight and how do we make this actionable. I like to structure any kind of reports as “We're sharing this metric with the newsroom: here’s the context for why it matters, and then here’s what we're going to do with it.”
Data is not just for audience teams; it is essential for justifying decisions and demonstrating value across an organization. Tracking metrics like RPMs (revenue per thousand impressions) across all networks is crucial for The New Republic to anticipate and fuel revenue generation and requires widespread understanding. Groves explained the importance of data literacy:
I've taught everyone across the organization, even those that never heard the word, to understand what an RPM is. You have to explain what these things are and why they are important to us: they truly move the needle if we figure out a way to improve them.
Just because Groves is the interim publisher of The New Republic doesn’t mean he doesn’t need evidence to power the work of his guiding coalition or inspire his volunteer army (that is, anyone who is not an audience team member who is working on audience-centered tasks). It’s also tied in with sustaining acceleration by taking key findings and making them central to how everyone is approaching their work, even if they’ve never thought about a specific metric or how it impacts their process; the urgency demands that they consider it now and make adjustments to allow everyone to progress.
Smith spoke about how data literacy has improved at many organizations, but that spreading the word about what the data tells us is essential to keeping that volunteer army motivated:
I think general knowledge has gotten better, [but] there's still a lot of room for progress. There are two areas that I think have driven improvement. One, I've noticed that it seems like journalists are more clued in to what's going on in the [audience] industry. ... So they're just paying attention a little bit more to the state of the industry, I would say. The other thing, more within our control, that I think makes a difference is basically doing internal PR for what the audience team does ... when [big changes] happen, making clear: This is work we're doing.
In terms of what that understanding allows, Smith said that it cleared the way for experimentation with different formats to meet the needs of a changing news consumer market. “It's helped people in the newsroom side,” she said, “to deprioritize the website [and] think more, ‘Should this be a video instead of a written article that we post on Instagram?’" This data-driven approach directly counters the challenges of splintered audiences and declining traditional platform traffic by helping identify where audiences are and what they do in those spaces. This in turn meshed with The 19th’s turn to total audience metrics, counting more instances of engagement as valuable and worth celebrating. “Before we did [the total audience] model, we were already asking [editorial] to write social-first stories or try a video. And they felt like that wasn't being counted.” But when things like Instagram video views and other non-pageview metrics appeared in the total audience figures, Smith said, it incentivized journalists to think more broadly about format and forms of reporting. “Their majority response from day one was like, ‘Oh, cool, this counts now! Yeah!’"
Joyce Tang of New York Magazine spoke about being open to the stories that data can tell and turning that information into opportunity as being central to audience thinking. The strategic vision needed for change, and the ability to sustain acceleration are both fed by this approach.
You're obviously pushing certain things, but [it’s important to just let] things happen, and notice them, and take a minute to look at that, and say, “Well, that's an opportunity, how can we adapt it elsewhere?” Or, “How can we amplify it in this or that platform?”
In another example, Tang spoke about an anomalous success leading to a deeper understanding of platform behavior, and in turn spurring change in how stories are conceived and deployed:
We were noticing a lot of success on Apple News with particular types of stories … and It turns out that it was being largely driven by people listening to those stories on Apple News. And that really unlocked something.
Shah related an anecdote that showcased another strength in data, which is finding a more complex story within what appears to be a simple story. While at The City, a Covid tracking tool that had been popular during the height of the pandemic had seen decidedly slowing interest as time went on, and sunsetting such a tool seemed the rational move (and indeed, making calls about getting rid of ongoing tools and features to make way for the new is a hallmark of change management):
So the team was like, "We should retire this Covid tracker. What's the point? There's not a lot of people reading it. It's our lowest [traffic] thing. And we're just using government numbers and plugging them in.” And we were getting steady traffic, but low traffic. But when I dug into the numbers, I realized that our most loyal reader segment, the people that came to the site more than six or seven times a month, were the ones that were using the tracker. So I was like, "Okay, we can't retire this tracker because our most loyal readers are reading it, and people who are loyal readers are often the ones that become donors." Eventually when we did [retire it], we had a really thoughtful communication plan around that. We let people know why we were doing it and what it meant and where they could find reliable numbers. So having a nuanced understanding, I think, is really important.
Data is the fuel for change. It helps to let all branches of an organization follow and understand where changes are happening, where opportunities are emerging, and why audience teams are developing plans, experimenting, and asking for help. Yet as these testimonials all suggest, the data isn’t useful without buy-in and comprehension, and the next rule synthesizes the skills that audience teams have at analyzing data and putting it to use and drawing in the larger organization to feel seen and involved—a participant in confronting change head-on.
Principle 3: Cultivate Relationships and Be The Teacher
Audience work serves as a bridge connecting different parts of the newsroom and broader organization. Traditionally, audience teams have worked closely with product and marketing teams, but in today’s environment, adequate response to the changes happening externally requires close collaboration between audience teams and every sector of an organization. Relationships are at the heart of several of Kotter’s steps, yet the relationship-building that audience teams need to enable their work to progress—to actually spread urgency, form strategic vision, generate wins, and keep the momentum to sustain acceleration—all depend to a huge extent on creating positive relationships between audience team members and the larger organization. A lot of that relationship-building, as we will see, comes down to teaching and learning. Audience workers have always struggled with this rule, both because their colleagues in other departments may resist change and also because of the quick pace and frequent unknowns that accompany their work. The 19th’s Alexandra Smith noted the historical role of audience professionals in this capacity: “The work that falls on the audience person is really like bridging those gaps—making those connections, doing little workshops, creating one-sheets.”
A significant responsibility for audience professionals, especially in leadership roles, involves coaching leadership and educating other teams, particularly reporters and editors, on the realities of the changing audience landscape. This includes explaining the impact of algorithm changes, the value of content consumed off-site, and the rationale behind focusing on different platforms or formats. It can also mean literally training editors and others how to create accounts on platforms, how to log in, how to post. “Especially once I got top-level buy-in to some of the things I wanted to do,” said Smith, “I had to train editors on literally every step of how to do it." Smith describes her approach to this internal communication:
I think of it as doing internal PR for what the audience team does. So a reporter shares an article about Apple Mail’s open-rate change, right? The manager of the audience team has to say, “Yeah, the audience team learned about this three weeks ago. We've been working on a plan since. Here's what we're considering.” We don't share everything we're looking at upfront. I think that would feel too cumbersome, or as if we're trying to justify our jobs.
This mirrors Ryan Kellett’s anecdote above, about the motivation to not be caught flat-footed when an executive asks about some new trend. Audience teams are often privy to trends before they’ve hit the mainstream, and need to become in-house experts and explain to others in the organization what they’ve learned. This is valuable for steering audience initiatives in the right directions, or influencing editorial and other departments so their work can have maximal impact; yet its greatest value might be in building trust. That shiny new thing you just heard about? Our team hasn’t just already been thinking about it. We’ve done some small tests, talked to peers, looked at the data, and made a plan. And the best part is saying to others “Here’s where you come in, because this new initiative is going to make your work go further.”
As noted above, Smith is among the pioneers in focusing on total audience to look at where organizations are meeting needs, connecting with audiences, and building loyalty. She described why the overall metric was so important to unify the larger team around. “It's really more of a culture change tool,” she said. Building strong relationships and trust with reporters and editors in this way is fundamental for integrating new workflows and getting buy-in for new strategies. Kellett emphasized the foundational nature of these relationships:
One of the reasons I did a lot of individual outreach, working with individual reporters, the sort of thing not explicitly in my job description... was because that was the key to them handing me that story before hitting ‘publish,’ so me and my team could wrap our minds around a distribution strategy or other approach. All that starts with some sort of relationship with the newsroom. One of the reasons I did a lot of this individual outreach or working with individual reporters ... was because it gained me trust in the newsroom. I got face time with these people. I knew I could help them. I became a reliable person that could really have a relationship with people.
This collaborative and educational function helps overcome internal resistance and ensures that everyone understands the "why" behind strategic shifts. Zainab Shah of AJP echoed this approach and spoke about taking a systematic approach to educating her colleagues:
[I did] audience workshops to level everyone's understanding of what audience work entails. And at the end of the workshops, I would do an open invitation to anyone who wants to experiment or try something. One of the strategies that I employed was picking one or two people in the newsroom who got it, who were interested in experimentation. Then we would place a bet on what would be a successful first or second project and show people the results from that, show how paying attention to audience needs will lead to sustainable growth, deeper engagement with your readers, and a deeper understanding of what people want to see and read.
Of course, not everyone in media is reluctant to embrace audience initiatives—but it’s best not to expect too much. Rubina Fillion of The New York Times stressed that communication that expresses the limitations or unknowns in experiments and initiatives was critical, especially with leadership, to setting reasonable expectations. “That's the way that our audience team communicates with our leaders too,” she said. “They very much explain the limitations and what's possible and what is not possible.”
Bryan Groves, as a leader at The New Republic who spent many years in audience, knows the value of cross-departmental relationships, education, and guidance. “I have audience people working with editorial every day,” he said. “They need to figure out: How do we generate an AI headline? How do we throw six headlines out there to find out which one is getting the most attention?" And the communication shouldn’t always be one-way. One of the innate benefits of open lines of dialogue and relationships of trust is that people feel comfortable sharing ideas. On the unexpected success of the publication’s transcript publishing, he noted, "Our marketing director is the one that was reading Substack and saw our transcripts and came to us and said, ‘Let's do transcripts.’ I'm like, ‘Okay, sounds great. Let's do it.’" Publishing transcripts supercharged visitors to the publication’s podcast section, resulting in increased subscriptions and increased ad revenue from page visits.
Groves also prioritizes two-way communication to empower other teams to have a voice in audience decisions, breaking down silos. "I think a good idea can come from any department,” he said. “I'm open to any idea, even from editorial folks that think they know audience." On regular team meetings to share ideas and discuss change, he said:
We have meetings [with a larger team of stakeholders] once a month where people have to come up with an idea or two just to chat about it. Sometimes they're terrible ideas! But we talk it out. I am definitely open to anyone’s ideas. I love new things.
Shah shared something from her workshops, something incredibly basic to most audience professionals, but something that has been historically a point of tension between audience and editorial:
In those workshops I would talk about two things: reach and impact. You obviously don't want people to feel like if their work is not doing numbers, it's not important, So having an understanding of both of those things is really important. Real success is when those two things overlap. And it doesn't mean that you don't do the really hard, impactful work that not a lot of people are going to read. But it means that you also must be doing impactful work that a lot of people are going to read, and also work that might not feel as impactful, but is useful and has utility and is far reaching.
Here we have a great example of one of the challenges of audience work, since at heart it’s interested in getting the great work being done in front of real readers, a goal that is, understandably, not always primary in writers and editors, but that nonetheless is needed if a publication is to sustain itself and survive. This is the heart of the communication principle: getting across the needs for sustainability while showing an understanding for the work and what goes into it, and finding a way to make those two elements converge.
Principle 4: Hire Changemakers Who Aren’t Scared of Change Coming For Them
The unpredictable and constantly shifting nature of audience work necessitates a deliberate approach to hiring and team management.This is particularly critical when roles are rapidly evolving, as was the case a few years ago when audience teams were growing quickly; they may be shrinking or undergoing redefinition now. The ability to help team members understand what the audience team’s work is for is crucial for retaining talent and demonstrating value in a chaotic landscape.
There was a time when media organizations hired platform-specific experts, yet, as already indicated, many of the people I interviewed stressed that this was not a future-proofing solution. Given that platforms and tools change frequently, focusing on inherent adaptability and core skills is more important than hiring for specific platform expertise. Rubina Fillion articulated this hiring philosophy:
I never hired a “Twitter person” or a “Facebook person.” I really thought about people who were able to adapt information in a way that made it more accessible to others. And so it didn't matter to me what the platform was at all. I figured that the platforms would change over time, but it was more the ability to communicate [that I was looking for]. I had a very detailed audience edit test that I put together that did ask you to write tweets and Facebook posts and Instagram captions and whatnot, but it was really just trying to test, How well are you able to interpret information and present it in a way that that's much more accessible than an 800-word article? It was really just about that sensibility and judgment.
Alexandra Smith of The 19th explained the shift like this:
We used to hire for platforms or products, and even now some [people] who are looking for growth opportunities will ask if they should just be our Instagram editor and I'm like, “No. As a friend, never do a platform-specific job. What if we leave Meta tomorrow? What would your job be?" I have shifted to try to build jobs around what part of audience work or outcome is the focus ... Are you focused on finding new people, reach, and distribution? Are you focused on deeper engagement and smaller scale community work?”
Smith also spoke about the importance of managing fear and confusion among staff during changes and "having a kind of template for how we communicate things to staff so that we're not building it from scratch every time.” Her team used the template to keep up a steady stream of information-sharing on Slack, org-wide emails, and in standing meetings, “to help people feel less afraid or confused or riled up about something.”
Bryan Groves of The New Republic highlighted the need for talented generalists over specialized roles: "At this point in time you need [people] who can focus more on what the story really is, and how it can flow to various different places, which levers to push." He noted that with prior platform positions, managers "had to either switch them out or re-educate them or sort of figure out" how to adapt them. This puts enormous strain on the individuals and the team, leading to churn, burnout, and less continuity.
Joyce Tang of New York Magazine described how this challenge comes into play: "I think it's really hard to find people who can toggle between [platforms]." She added that budgets often necessitate "asking a junior-ish social editor to be doing all sorts of things and constantly experimenting,” and that without a strategic plan for how the audience team functions as a whole, individuals can easily become overwhelmed.
You need a certain level of strategic and really nimble, flexible thinking about audience. [You need] to find somebody who can be like, “I understand that the Pinterest audience is so different from what you would need for a Twitter audience.”
AJP’s Zainab Shah described how she’s tried to get ahead of the inevitability of changing and evolving roles on her teams and those she’s advising, with an eye not only to the flux inherent in the work but also to the need to justify the work in a financial sense:
Hiring for change is a challenge! I like to say up front: “A big part of this job is going to be experimenting, and thus evolving your role in the direction where you find experiments to be successful.” You want people to take ownership of that themselves as much as possible and be excited about this new thing and also love doing this new thing, and maybe even grow [their] role in that direction. The other thing I like to do as an anchoring practice, and this comes from an environment in which layoffs are so common, I want to make sure that everything they're doing has a near-direct line to revenue. If you can't trace your work directly to some kind of revenue, whether that's membership revenue or sponsorship revenue or philanthropic funding, then you should seriously consider not doing that part of your job. Even if in the beginning we thought something was important [to the role], every 4 or 6 months you assess if this person's role is valuable or useful or if there need to be some adjustments to make sure that they can continue doing the role. I tell my teams: “The house is always on fire. You're always triaging because it's journalism. [But] there's only 24 hours in the day and I don't want you to burn out. and when you're making decisions on what to do and what not to do, choose the things that have a direct line to revenue to keep doing and doing well.
Having an eye toward the financial sustainability of one’s work is key not only in an unstable industry, but in an unstable division of that industry. Anyone who’s worked in audience for a good amount of time can tell you how many people bounce out of the work, and out of journalism, simply because justifying the importance of their work can be exhausting. Shah suggests a way to prepare audience workers for this situation. Meanwhile Ryan Kellett discussed the road to gaining the support and buy-in of leadership as well as other parts of the organization, an existential challenge that audience teams had to work together to address. "That was one of the fundamental pieces of audience work from the start: the big organization was, like, Why do you even have an audience team?" Such external doubt about the relevance or need for audience work requires building teams that parse the data, communicate, and educate, and embrace experimentation to fuel those conversations.
I designed a whole team around it. We literally had a team that was the experiments team… Wanna try Tumblr? Let's try Tumblr. Do it this way and focus on this particular topic, because then we have enough data to be able to say whether we should double down on it or cut it from the stack. And we have an answer for the publisher at the end of the day that says, "We tried this and this is not working for us," or "We tried this and it's actually really promising," or "We need to kick this over to the product team," or "We need to involve more people or let's get more resources."
This team would then feed results back to the larger audience team, who would make calls on where to proceed and then feed back the reasoning, the results, and the plan for moving forward.
Several of those I interviewed also spoke about managing the constant internal changes in direction, priorities, and even job descriptions as a significant leadership challenge in maintaining a team. Audience leaders must instill a sense of adaptability while also providing support and empathy to team members navigating this uncertainty and potential burnout. Shah put it this way:
If you like going to school, you're going to be good at audience work, because we’re constantly learning and we're curious about what the latest thing is. But you also have to shield and protect the team from information overload. They're like, "There's this new platform. Should we do that?" and you don't want them to be overwhelmed. It's okay that you translate that for everyone and say, "Look, we know that we're hearing people say [for example] they're getting donations on Bluesky." But we also must be mindful that we have one social media editor who's now working on video because that's increasing our reach on Instagram. So right now it might be a question of capacity and what we're going to do is find a low-lift way to maintain a presence in Bluesky that doesn't tax our social editor's time too much. And at some point if we hear that our audience [on the platform] is growing in a meaningful way, or people are responsive to us, we're going to see if we want to switch gears, but we're not there yet. But we're keeping an eye on it.” Because the thing that happens most often for social editors and audience teams is burnout. And you want to make sure that you're protecting your team from that. You're kind of this middle person between the leadership and sometimes leadership will be like, “Why can't we do all of the things?” So you're also protecting in both directions, to say, “It's just a matter of resources, and time.” And it's just as important to know when to stop doing something as to know when to start doing something new. So I don't like to give a social editor something new to do unless I take something off their plate. It's kind of the balancing act.
Kellett discussed the human impact of this constant state of flux:
I call it “managing the 'thrash”... how bad is the thrash on this or that staffing shift? You can get ahead of some of that by asking questions like, “Is this gonna affect their salary? Their title? Their self worth? Their conception of themselves?” [For] some of that I got tips from reading some leadership literature, but it’s a thing that I think a lot about: how to be really thoughtful in that space.
This emphasizes the need for empathetic leadership that recognizes the personal toll of constant change and actively works to mitigate it. Building adaptable teams and prioritizing strong people management skills are essential for maintaining capacity, morale, and overall organizational resilience in the face of continuous disruption and evolving roles across the media industry.
Principle 5: Leading Through Change, Change through Leadership
One of the things I was anxious to discuss with my interviewees was the relationship between audience and leadership in their experiences. I was surprised at how many said that leadership were among the first to understand the value of audience work, and less surprised that leadership also set unrealistic expectations on the power of social media, virality, trend-hopping, and the amount of output audience teams could handle. Yet, as the title of this project suggests, I believe there’s something incredibly valuable in the experience of audience work that is ideal for future leaders, in no small part thanks to the rules laid out above.
Like leaders, audience teams have to have a solid understanding of the entire publication—its values, its tone, its purpose, its structure, and where its wins and losses have occurred, and then make decisions based on that knowledge. Bryan Groves of The New Republic emphasizes this point from the perspective of an audience professional in a leadership role:
I think that the audience person is the best person to put in charge of an organization because we’ve worked with data for a long time. We know all the data. I stilI look every day at the page views, at Apple News, at Yahoo, at the complete audience; not just pageviews on [the site]. Look at your full audience and go to the editors and writers and be like, “Okay, our audience is here, this is where the data tells us we need to be.”
Pushing to institute shifts in editorial output, from subjects covered to article length, based on the results of data, is one of the toughest balancing acts that audience professionals have to perform. Groves struck an aggressive stance on this aspect of leading, very much informed by his day-to-day work as interim publisher for his organization. It has, in my experience and in that of many who I interviewed, been one of the trickier aspects of the job as one attains more senior positions. It can be difficult to motivate a volunteer army by telling them they’ve been doing things the wrong way, and it can be a strain on hard-won relationships of trust when the data points to formats, subjects, tones, and other aspects of journalistic output that may not have been priorities, or preferences, in the past.
Ryan Kellett suggested that the attenuation of audience workers mirrored that of executives, in terms of juggling so many tasks and responsibilities—eyeing shifting trends and kicking off innovative experiments, digging deep into data to discover insights, while also attending to core tasks (write the social copy, get the newsletter out on time, make sure the SEO is in shape):
You're trying to do this high-level strategy and also day-to-day work, simultaneously. Even the person on an audience team who has one clear role, still has to sit in a strategy conversation and say something useful; that sort of stretchiness and then leveling of your brain. This is pretty common for leadership. I had a good editor tell me this one time: 'You gotta go down to the details really quickly, and then back up to the strategy. Zoom in, zoom out.'
AJP’s Zainab Shah echoed this concept of double awareness of the big picture and the smaller picture as a strong asset that audience leaders can bring to organization leadership.
I think people who have an understanding of the discipline definitely make better leaders because they're more well-rounded in their leadership style and their understanding of success metrics. Even something as basic as What does success look like? They have a better handle on that. One of the hardest parts of the job is to switch between the nitty-gritty execution, and to then step back and do a big-picture strategy and an understanding of long-term vision.
She shared an anecdote about a newsletter, scheduled to be sent, when a news story or community tragedy occurs. “The topper or the lede of the newsletter would suddenly sound really tone-deaf,” she noted. An inexperienced person might not know whether to pull or adjust the newsletter or leave it as scheduled, but a seasoned audience director would know to “press pause and just go into the ESP and rewrite the lede in that moment.” Having these instincts, Shah suggests, is the difference between a leader understanding audience work and thinking with an audience mindset.
Being able to switch gears in that way is important, because that connects to our long-term goal of reflecting the community and understanding where people are at on any given day and what they want to read first thing in the morning.
She extended this kind of awareness to be critical in leading through change:
People are like “Why are things changing? Why are we being asked to work more hours on this stuff?” And I always like to tie it back to impact: this is going to help us reach our goals and tie it to what you love about your job.
Kellett also found that creating new teams like the podcast unit and spinning them out was effective: "I loved it because it felt like I would give away parts of the organization as we go even though more and more people would actually come to audience." Leadership's understanding of the nature of audience work helps: "I think that the level of empathy for audience jobs is uniquely high."
Erika Andersen's Harvard Business Review article, "Change Is Hard. Here's How to Make It Less Painful," offers a good window into how to synthesize several of the elements of Rogers’ and Kotter’s models in a contemporary context, where urgency and motivation must coexist with care. This is critical when thinking about managing change in the context of audience work. Audience teams must be leaders, cheerleaders, and supportive friends to other parts of the organization in order to do their jobs effectively. Andersen highlights the human response to change, noting that people initially tend to view change as difficult, costly, and weird (any audience professional who’s worked in media for a few years will find this response very familiar!). She emphasizes the importance of shifting this mindset to one where change is perceived as easy, rewarding, and normal. Leaders can facilitate this shift using "change levers," such as increasing understanding by clearly communicating what the change is, why it's happening, and the better future it offers. Clarifying and reinforcing priorities by outlining what is not changing can also be reassuring. Giving people control and providing consistent support throughout the change process are also crucial for fostering buy-in and making change less painful.
And finally, like successful leaders, audience teams that excel are visionary without losing sight of the fundamentals. You still have to get the work done, even as you’re inventing the future of journalism, rallying support around it, building the tools to create it, testing testing testing, and (if it works) making it a permanent addition to the new fundamentals.
Conclusion: Journalism’s Crucible
The news media has undergone profound transformations over the past decade, presenting significant challenges for media in general, and consequently for all areas of audience work. These changes have been driven by a confluence of factors, including technological advancements, shifting audience behaviors, economic pressures, and global events. Most media professionals are very familiar with these shifts, and have been working in various ways to adapt to them, but I would argue that audience teams are the point of the spear in addressing them and managing the innovations needed.
Nearly all of the major challenges require solutions that can only come from audience teams staying adaptable, following the data, collaborating with other departments, hiring for flexibility and critical thinking, and deploying that “zoom-in, zoom-out” approach to problem solving. Audience professionals may not all be well versed in the theories of change management, but it should be clear that the work they’re doing is most certainly the work of managing change. Audience professionals would do well to study the practice of change management to enhance their natural inclinations, while leadership can learn a great deal about change management from watching their audience teams at work.
Acknowledgements
This project was a labor of love, but was made possible with the additional love and care and brains of many people. I’d like to thank everyone in my cohort, especially Antti Karvanen, for providing me with an incredibly thoughtful, caring, and encouraging learning environment throughout my time in the CUNY Executive Leadership Program. Special thanks to my coach Mary Nahorniak for helping to guide this project from idea to research to reality, and for reading many many pages that came before those above, and providing incredibly smart and useful feedback always. And of course this project would not have had the depth and personality it does without all the amazing audience superstars who I interviewed for this project: Rubina Fillion, Bryan Groves, Ryan Kellett, Zainab Shah, Alexandra Smith, and Joyce Tang. Thank you all! And none of this would exist without my best reader, in all things, Christine.
References and Appendices
Authors: Alessandro Bollo, Cristina Da Milano, Alessandra Gariboldi, Chris Torch, “Final Report, Study on Audience Development - How to place audiences at the centre of cultural organisations,” European Commission, 2017
Sam Ragland,“Managing change in news organizations starts with leading people well,” American Press Institute/BetterNews.org, 2023
Natalie Jomini Stroud, “Managing change within news organizations,” American Press Institute, 2015
Erika Andersen, “Change Is Hard. Here’s How to Make It Less Painful,” Harvard Business Review, 2022
https://hbr.org/2022/04/change-is-hard-heres-how-to-make-it-less-painful
Ekdale, B., Singer, J. B., Tully, M., & Harmsen, S. (in press). Making change: diffusion of technological, relational, and cultural innovation in the newsroom. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. doi: 10.1177/1077699015596337
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077699015596337
Media and Change Management: Creating a Path for New Content Formats, Business Models, Consumer Roles, and Business Responsibility, Editors: Matthias Karmasin, Sandra Diehl, Isabell Koinig, Springer International Publishing, 2022
https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/media-and-change-management/20135248
Everett M. Rogers, “Diffusion of Innovations,” Free Press, 1962
Louise Story, “What is the MACU?” Medium/WSJ Digital Experience & Strategy, 2020
John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen, The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012
John P. Kotter, Leading Change, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012
Amaris Castillo, “As journalists think of leaving X for Bluesky and Threads, media experts see pros and cons,” Poynter, December 3, 2024
John Koblin, Michael M. Grynbaum, and Benjamin Mullin, “Inside the Implosion of CNN+” The New York Times, April 24, 2022
Brian Knutson, Tiffany Hsu, Michael Ko, and Jeanne Tsai, “News source bias and sentiment on social media,” 2024
Claire E Robertson, Nicolas Pröllochs, Kaoru Schwarzenegger, Philip Pärnamets, Jay J Van Bavel, Stefan Feuerriegel, “Negativity drives online news consumption,” 2023
Conversation with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, “Is journalism inherently pessimistic? Why is there so much ‘bad news’?” University of Oxford