Audience development – Whose job is it?

Updated 3 Oct 2026

Defining Audience Development

A definition of what audience development consists of is most likely something that keeps evolving as the industry does. Within this project, it covers the whole craft of defining the target audience, their needs, the metrics of success and the product we offer them to engage with. It also covers the knowledge, the skills and the means that make a publisher relevant, available and accessible to the audience, which takes knowing the channels, the ecosystem and the whole life of that audience. Audience engagement is what audience development is after.

The other three elements of this project are parts of that craft. Defining the audience, purposeful engagement and measuring success each have their own page, and this one asks who does the work.

Newsrooms were talking about engagement before they were talking about audience development. In 2009 The Globe and Mail's communities editor, Mathew Ingram, said that readers want to interact with other people rather than with brands or faceless institutions. That relationship helps journalists with feedback on their stories and pays off for the outlet too. Engaging readers meant "listening and responding as well as asking for attention," rather than only pushing out links.

Five years later, The New York Times' 2014 Innovation Report defined audience development as the work of expanding the paper's loyal and engaged audience, and broke it into discovery, promotion and connection. The report wanted a senior newsroom leader in charge of it, and said the effort should be everyone's job. It also described the problem this page is about, in its own words: "pushed to the margins, typically left to our business-side colleagues or handed to small teams in the newsroom."

In 2021 Sarah Marshall's piece in Nieman Lab's predictions traced the term from marketing into newsrooms, where it started as expertise in SEO and social channels and grew into the bridge role between editorial and business that it has become. The nature of the craft is to evolve with the behavior and the needs of the audience, which keeps the definition moving. And because every publisher's audience differs from the next, so does the work of developing it.

Interviewing fifteen journalists in audience-oriented roles across different media systems in 2017, Raul Ferrer-Conill and Edson Tandoc found that the influence and the scale of those roles varied widely from market to market and from newsroom to newsroom. Routines covered checking the analytics first thing in the morning, opening the daily editorial meeting with yesterday's numbers and tomorrow's hunches, and making sure the journalism reaches the widest audience possible, to "elevate the voice of the reader" in the newsroom.¹ The interviews behind this project, made eight years later, point the same way. The work is still most pronounced in the US and the UK, where the named teams and the formal structures sit, while some digital natives run ahead of them. Zetland came up more than once when the practitioners talked about what good looks like.

Three questions run under the rest of this page.

1. Purpose. Why are we doing audience development? The work can look backward, analyzing what already happened, or it can sit in an active role with a say in what the newsroom will do next.
2. Substance. What does the craft cover, and where does it stop? Define it widely enough and you run into product, marketing and the rest of the newsroom every day.
3. Practice. How is the work organized, and who does it? Is the craft kept at a distance from the newsroom, or is it part of it?

The people doing the work describe it as a split between a team and a responsibility.

We do have a centralized team, but audience development and audience engagement is not a centralized responsibility.

Ross Maghielse, The Philadelphia Inquirer

In our newsroom, audience engagement work is everyone's responsibility. But we incubate it and evangelize it in a centralized place, so we hold the knowledge of our audience.

Jennifer Hicks, The Wall Street Journal

We don't have one single entity. In principle it should be done everywhere.

Anu Vilkman, Yle

The Arc of Audience Development

The craft was never assembled in one place. Each era put the knowledge about readers somewhere new in the organization, and the new owner rarely took over from the old one completely. That is why the question of whose job it is keeps coming back.

Pre-digital era (through 1994). The audience was not anyone's job in the newsroom, and that was partly by choice. Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc describe journalists sidelining audience feedback to protect their editorial autonomy, and also because they found the feedback unreliable.¹ The letters came from the few readers who bothered to write. The readership surveys covered a small portion of the actual audience. What knowledge existed lived on the business side, where the commercial departments, the strategy unit and the media research department all had more capacity to analyze audiences than the newsroom did.² Jennifer Hicks, who worked at The Wall Street Journal for 20 years, remembers when the newsroom and marketing "just didn't even talk."

Early web era (1995–2005). The first decade of online news was the first decade of audience development. Those of us continuing the audience-centric transformation owe a lot to the early ones, who fought their way into the newsrooms and into the masthead. The people who were there tell it best, so this era leans on what they wrote and said at the time.

At the Los Angeles Times, as the paper's web news editor Barbara Serrano wrote in Nieman Reports in September 2005, hardly anyone in the newsroom or in senior management knew where the online operation was located or who was in charge of it. Basic connections had never been made between the web staff and the people who mattered on the editorial and the business sides. Interest in online readers and in the people looking after them gained traction because print circulation was falling and editors were starting to see what the web could do. Top editors began counting web users as part of the paper's readership. In the summer of 2005, print editors took week-long turns as guest editors on the site, watching which stories readers went to. The plan they settled on put a web editor in every department of the newsroom.

As online publishing fought for its standing, it was brought closer to the legacy business, both in the org chart and physically. In The Washington Post, the web staff worked a few miles from the Post building and inside a separate company. The transcript of the 2007 International Symposium on Online Journalism, where four of these newsrooms sat on the same panel, sums up the era from the top players' own angle.³ washingtonpost.com's executive editor Jim Brady said there is no right answer on structure, and that being separate let the site develop a character of its own. It was free to try the "webbier things" and to grow up with a very different culture, some of which would have creeped out the print newsroom. His side's job, as he put it, was to build the web audience and get people to come more often, read more pages and stay longer, while the paper's managers dealt with circulation and revenue. The separation had a price. Print staffers felt the web was happening somewhere else and was not part of their future, and when the site let readers comment on articles, the print newsroom wanted it stopped.

Also at The New York Times, where the org chart had put the website under the executive editor in 2005, most web producers still worked seven blocks away in the old digital building. At The Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com's managing editor Bill Grueskin arrived in 2001 to find the online and print staffs sitting side by side in the same building, unequal in standing, with the online desk reporting to the head of electronic publishing and almost no traffic between the two. At USA Today the two sides sat on separate floors and worked, in executive editor Kinsey Wilson's description, collaboratively but at arm's length until the merger at the end of 2005.

For many, 9/11 was the turning point. In the Washington Post, everyone at the paper saw quickly how that story could be covered in real time, and the day made people realize they needed the ability to produce news around the clock, which led to the continuous news desk in 2003. At The New York Times, continuous news desk editor Neil Chase said 2001 promoted the value of the website and the newsgathering operation, and was one of the first times the site's own journalists were out gathering news rather than catching what the newsroom brought in.

At The Wall Street Journal 9/11 went the other way. The online staff evacuated to Dow Jones' back office in New Jersey and spent a year there, out of sight of the print newsroom, and the distance proved liberating. The younger online staffers stopped feeling intimidated, experimented more, and worried less about a veteran down the hall frowning at something on the homepage.

It took three years for the Journal to move back under the same roof, and it kept a separate staff and budget. The Journal's summary of the journey ran from passive coexistence before 9/11, through complete physical separation, then gradual reintegration, to close cooperation.

Platform era (2006–2018). Real-time analytics made audience behavior visible, and researchers started studying what the numbers were doing to newsrooms.⁴ The online crew found their levers in the numbers, and new roles started to emerge. In 2008 BusinessWeek Online named its first engagement editor, who helped the desk get comfortable with Twitter and blogging and worked with readers on the site's blog posts. The Globe and Mail had a communities editor. In May 2009 The New York Times appointed its first social media editor, a job coordinating the newsroom's use of social media. Social media was familiar from marketing and promotion, but it also had explicitly journalistic uses, and some of the newsroom could use the know-how. Only a handful of publications had anyone doing this work, but the job was expected to become common.

In 2012, [the team] was a group of editors, a couple of people trying to figure out how to distribute our news on all these newfangled channels and platforms. Facebook, what is that? How do we put news on it? App push alerts, what's that about? How are we going to reach people? Most people in the newsroom probably had no idea they even existed.

Jennifer Hicks, The Wall Street Journal

The same year, The Guardian did its part in democratizing data. Its analytics tool Ophan was created by three in-house developers as a side hustle. In December 2015 the paper reported that more than a thousand employees had used it in the previous month. At the time, the audience team it was built around had four people in the UK, all with editorial backgrounds. The data scientists sat elsewhere in the company.²

Around 2014 and 2015 the work grew from a few people into teams. In August 2014 Digiday called audience development czars the newest important people in newsrooms, working at "the nexus of journalism and marketing." After its Innovation Report, The New York Times invested heavily in analytics and its audience development team. The Financial Times created the role of head of audience engagement in March 2015. Its team of about ten mixed journalists with a data analyst, an SEO expert, an engagement strategist and a marketing manager, with a strategy of turning from "digital first" to "audience first." At the BBC, a new five-person team served a large newsroom and all 28 language services of the World Service.²

In June 2017 Digiday reported that publishers were questioning who should own audience development. The tension was traditional for media, to maximize journalistic impact or to maximize ad dollars. The New York Times and The Washington Post kept it in editorial. National Geographic made it part of the digital team, and Independent Journal Review treated it as marketing. CNN built an independent team, separate from both sales and editorial. Its head of digital operations argued that barriers between teams that weren't fluent in each other's languages were no longer "a sustainable model for journalism."

Post-platform era (2018–2023). As the industry started to notice the uncertainty in business models built on scale and third-party channels, the skills followed the money. When the race for scale was over, so were the free lunches. By 2019 more than two thirds of the leading newspapers in the US and Europe charged for online news.⁵ In a Reuters Institute survey of 200 news leaders in 29 countries that January, over half said subscription and membership would be their main revenue focus for the year, and less than half still called Facebook important.⁶

The job moved from bringing new readers in to bringing the same readers back, and the best teams became truly cross-functional. At The Wall Street Journal, people from data analytics, optimization and membership spent a year on what the paper called Project Habit. They identified "retention-driving actions" and reinvented how the Journal promoted those habits to its members. One finding was that a new subscriber's chance of picking up a habit halves by the fiftieth day.

Newsletters became the everyday tool. Email, "once thought of as low-tech and unfashionable," was proving increasingly valuable to publishers, the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report found in 2020.⁷ It helped build habit and loyalty, and for subscription businesses it was often "a critical weapon" against churn. The most successful newsletters were treated as editorial products, hosted by a senior journalist with an informal tone. By 2022 mainstream news organizations had been shifting resources into email production.⁸ The New York Times alone produced 50 newsletters read by 15 million people a week. Publishers used email to bring readers back to their own websites and apps, where the visits could be turned into money.

Membership introduced community management to the craft. A Tow Center guide published in February 2018 told newsrooms that the strategy and the outreach had to be carried out by newsroom staff, "not just business staff." Among the people a membership program needed, it listed community managers next to copywriters, web developers, fundraisers and user researchers. Becoming a member-driven newsroom, the guide warned, "requires a huge culture change for reporters and editors."⁹

AI-discovery era (2024–now). AI answers started to replace the click. At the start of 2026 the Reuters Institute asked 280 news leaders in 51 countries where they would put their effort in terms of off-platform strategies. AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity came second only to YouTube, while old-style Google SEO was one of the few things they planned to do less of.¹⁰ Three quarters said they would try to get their own staff to behave more like creators. In September 2026 The Guardian created 40 jobs to train journalists as content creators, across audio, video, photography, text and audience engagement.

Condé Nast moved its audience people into the brands. Audience development and social used to go through marketing, and video sat in a separate division, Condé Nast Entertainment. By the time of this project's interview in April 2025, all of them had moved into each brand's team under its editor, with a central audience strategy team in support. At Wired, the editor-in-chief had an audience development team of about three people next to her writers, designers and video producers.

It's kind of federated, and we make sure that each editorial team can very much set their own strategy. I never say that I set the strategy for the company, but I kind of guide the strategy for the company for audience.

Sarah Marshall, Condé Nast

What the arc shows

Era by era, the work keeps moving closer to the journalism. It started on the business side, in departments the newsroom did not talk to. It moved into a separate building, then into a corner of the newsroom, then into teams of its own, and finally into the brands and the journalists themselves. Every move shortened the distance between knowing the audience and making the journalism.

Each move followed a change in where the readers or the money came from. The web, the platforms and the paywalls each moved the work somewhere new. The old owners seldom gave the work up completely. That is why the marketing department and the newsroom both still hold a piece of it. It might sometimes feel like a lack of ownership, and the Membership Guide warns that everyone's responsibility can become no one's. Still, it is better to have many feeling ownership than none.

The questions underneath stay the same. Does the work look back at what happened, or does it have a say in what happens next? What does it cover, and where does it stop? Is it kept at a distance from the newsroom, or is it part of it? In every era the answers have moved toward a say in what comes next and toward the newsroom.

Where audience sits

At the largest newsrooms the audience team now sits in the middle of the journalism. When INMA's Amalie Nash talked to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2024, both had embedded their audience teams in the desks of the newsroom. The Times' team covered editorial and technical search, social, community, social visuals, data science and platform partnerships, all of it "happening at the center of the newsroom." At the Post, an assignment editor for SEO described the other half of the job, perhaps the most important half, as being "researchers and the eyes and ears of the audience."

In the early eras of audience development, call it 2010 to 2018, maybe even 2020, that decade was this team of usually six to seven people that went around the newsroom and told everyone what the audience was. That, to me, is not a model that should exist in current day.

Ross Maghielse, The Philadelphia Inquirer

At the Inquirer, editors now write their own SEO headlines. Wherever the team sits on the org chart, the newsroom has to trust it.

For audience work to succeed, it's essential that audience editors are fully trusted by the newsroom. That means they need both editorial and journalistic skills. Not just data and analytics expertise. If they're seen as outsiders, especially as marketing people, their efforts will face skepticism and fall short. To be effective, they must sit within the newsroom and be viewed as part of it.

Anna Dubenko, The New York Times

Who owns the definitions

What to count belongs to Measuring Success. This section is about who decides it, and how the numbers reach the people who make the journalism. In the interviews, the audience team rarely wrote the definitions alone. At The Wall Street Journal, the data team built the one-to-five score the newsroom works from. At Condé Nast, the central team's analysts report the company's KPIs to its leadership.

We use commercially driven KPIs that brands understand well. We encourage brands to prioritize formats with the highest monetizable value.

Sarah Marshall, Condé Nast

At The Atlantic, the product and data teams worked out how engaged a subscriber has to be before renewal becomes likely.

We needed to figure out which user actions actually benefits us and what correlates with downstream retention, so we created these reader states. To increase engagement, we discovered that certain behaviors, like newsletter signups or app usage, significantly increase long-term engagement.

Mariah Craddick, The Atlantic

A definition only works if the newsroom hears it. At the Journal, the director of audience development described a daily forensic. At least 15 minutes of the morning news meeting go to how a group of stories did and why. At The New York Times, the newsroom audience director sends the masthead a note before the morning meeting on where the coverage opportunities are, and follows up the next day on how the stories did.

As the roles in between have matured, the definitions have had to be written down. Bridge roles used to depend on personal relationships, social capital and networks, the Journal's new formats editor told JournalismUK in 2023. Now, he said, "it really comes down to having common goals and documentation, and set processes for how you communicate with each other." The Washington Post's head of curation and platforms put the job in one line: "You need to thread together the needs of the business, the journalists and the audience."

What the job has become

While conducting interviews with leading audience teams, one fact stood out clearly: nearly all team members came from journalism backgrounds. While the industry has faced waves of layoffs in recent years, audience roles are mostly staffed by journalists who have pivoted to non-editorial roles by adding new layers of expertise in data and user-centric thinking.

They all have traditional journalistic backgrounds that they apply towards audience engagement. We've hired reporters, people from radio stations, to come do digital stuff at the Inquirer. I'd say we are hiring a skill set more than a position.

Ross Maghielse, The Philadelphia Inquirer

The New York Times' Audience Editor vacancy from June 2025 outlines these hybrid expectations. It asks for strong experience in journalism, platform expertise and the ability to translate insights into editorial action. The full job description is here. In June 2026 Nieman Lab picked out 16 new journalism jobs designed to help publishers "future-proof their newsrooms." The roles combine development, audience and the future of news, from editor-coders who build prototypes themselves to audience editors who act as "the embedded, desk‑specific partner," translating audience signals into clear editorial choices.

Skills also outlast the platforms they were learned on.

I'm a proponent of creating teams that are nimble and can serve the needs of many platforms. In newsrooms, when there's a pivot to video or a pivot to something else, we leave teams dismantled, or we have to figure out what to do with them. So it's more about building teams around certain focuses. Community building could be Reddit and LinkedIn and your own platform, because those are skills that are paired together. Telling stories through short-form vertical video is a different kind of skill.

Jennifer Hicks, The Wall Street Journal

Audience-centricity is not a label you can simply attach to an existing product while continuing business as usual. True audience focus requires rethinking how journalism is created, distributed, and measured, starting with the needs of the people it serves.

Who are we writing for? What do their needs look like, especially in this particular moment? We then shape our coverage to meet those specific needs and moments.

Jennifer Hicks, The Wall Street Journal

Audience-centricity is a mindset that lives in the details.

We don't use no-reply emails. When I send a message, even to 12,000 people, recipients can hit reply and respond directly to me, not to a generic team inbox. They see that it's me writing, and I take pride in that. It's a very Zetland approach. We believe people should be able to talk to us. One of our key audience groups doesn't follow media institutions, they follow people. So it's important they know that we are people too.

Sofie Flagstad Hansen, Zetland

When it comes to connecting with audiences, legacy publishers are increasingly borrowing from the creator playbook. Outlets like CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times are experimenting with creator-inspired production styles and partnership programs to reach people on the platforms where creators already thrive. The Washington Post's WP Creator program is one example, pairing the newsroom with independent video creators to extend its reach.

Local newsrooms can adapt the same logic at a smaller scale by partnering with community-based creators who already have trusted relationships with the audiences they want to serve. The work is in identifying creators whose expertise, values, and audience align with your coverage areas and community focus.

The Future of Audience Development

Will audience development still be a job of its own when the next shift arrives? The people doing it today answer in different ways.

With some of these titles, if we're successful, we sort of work ourselves out of a job. If everyone is thinking about digital, you don't need a head of digital.

Jennifer Hicks, The Wall Street Journal

As data platforms race to add AI capabilities, agentic workflows, usually run through an accessible chat interface, are making it easier to turn a hypothesis into a data-backed insight. Databricks made its Genie One "agentic coworker" generally available in June 2026. Business users can ask it about company data without SQL, and it goes on to produce "documents, reports, and artifacts." Snowflake's enterprise agent, launched in November 2025 to let "every user" answer complex questions in natural language, was renamed Snowflake CoWork the following June and now connects to email, calendar and Slack. The Guardian democratized its numbers with a dashboard in 2012. Looking ahead to 2026, The Wall Street Journal's director of newsroom data and AI forecast the "full democratisation of audience data across the newsroom," powered by dedicated data chatbots, so that data and insights would "no longer be confined to dashboards or specialised roles."

Some publishers have already built the plumbing. DRIVE, a group of 30 regional publishers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, exposes performance data from millions of articles, along with user needs insights, through an MCP server, so that any member can use it inside the AI platform it prefers.

Others see the work splitting into more specialties, not fewer. When this project interviewed The New York Times, its newsroom audience team had about 60 people, partly because search and social need someone on duty around the clock.

The disagreement comes mostly from how each newsroom's audience is structured today, and from how the future looks from there. Facing the machines, discovery has to be learned again, and so does building habit-forming products, now that audiences increasingly access news through AI. When Google rolled out AI Overviews in 2024, the audience directors interviewed by Nieman Lab had little to go on, and The Washington Post's deputy head of audience strategy pointed out that Google provided "no data" on the summaries. Two years later the Reuters Institute described answer engine optimization as techniques "similar to SEO," with differences in how content "may need to be created and described."¹⁰ Some nonprofit newsrooms saw their search traffic grow anyway by publishing what a summary could not replace, information that "can't be broken down at Google's summary length."

In the same Reuters Institute survey, 75 percent of news leaders expected agentic tools to have a large or very large impact on the news industry. As automation and agents reshape newsrooms, whose work is it to do the verification and look after trust?

Facing people, the bet is on voice and relationship.

I'm giving the community all of myself. My voice, my personality, everything. So how do we translate that into the app? How do we make my presence a natural part of the experience on all of our platforms?

Sofie Flagstad Hansen, Zetland

I think people move in and out of engagement depending on their current mode or what's happening in their lives. Someone might be highly engaged one month and then two months later drop off completely.

Alexandra Smith, The 19th

Some are trying to do both.

We don't want to lose sight of search. It's not dead, just evolving. Newsletters are a major priority: we're moving from link lists to voice-driven, narrative formats that drive revenue while continuing to test emerging channels.

Sarah Marshall, Condé Nast

Are these the questions for the AI era?

1. Purpose: Why are we doing audience development, when agents can read the data and draft the distribution?
2. Substance: What does the craft cover, when discovery, product and data run through the same agents?
3. Practice: How is the verification done and the trust kept, when anyone in the newsroom can ask the data a question?