Guest Essay

Service-oriented journalism: Moving from idealism to utility

Insights from conversations with over 70 journalists, funders, and audience experts

By Madison Karas and Patrick Boehler

September 17, 2025

Earlier this summer, we shared a theory of service for journalism. The formula we proposed is simple: journalism is a service of providing information, relevance ensures it matters to people’s lives, and time allows for use and reflection. Together, they ensure that our work reaches and helps people who benefit from it make better decisions for themselves in their lives, creating measurable public good. 

A participant from the Aug. 18 Lenfest Communities of Practice workshop put it best: “Usefulness requires trust, and many audiences simply don’t trust traditional journalism practitioners.”

We have been circling this theory around in group workshops and one-on-one conversations via the Audience Help Desk. Below, we are sharing the themes dominating the discussions:

What’s still getting in the way

One participant summarized the core problem: “We superserve the people who are like us and fail to serve people with different needs and different relationships to information.”

Traditional business models have become a core obstacle. Old metrics such as page views and click rates are still driving revenue decisions, while failing to connect what’s being measured to what actually matters to communities. This has made it difficult to imagine what journalism could be, leaving us sifting through old wreckage and current constraints only to fall short of a future our audiences deserve. 

“Many want to blame the public for their changed appetite and interest in news.” But the reality is that a smorgasbord of funder pressure, strategy gaps, fear of risk, and resistance to change are getting in the way of more relevant and useful journalism with trusted information that helps people navigate overwhelming volumes of content, propaganda, and potential harm.

Measurement remains broken. Traditional metrics like page views fail to capture actual value. The attribution problem, connecting journalism to community outcomes, frustrates everyone. Funders demand quantifiable results that may not reflect real impact and tie newsrooms to messaging expectations. Long-term change happens slowly and resists easy tracking.

Tactical optimization dominates conversations. Discussions about platform comparisons and business models hijack conversations where genuine needs should be addressed, replacing purpose-driven dialogue with debates about methods. Practitioners face mounting pressure as decades-old questions like “How do we maximize X?” remain the default framework for strategic discussions. This mentality infiltrates spaces meant for genuine exploration of new models, sacrificing intentionality and rendering strategic reflection a mere inconvenience rather than a necessity. With so much focus on optimization, we never get to the big risks worth taking.

Crisis paralysis in practice. With so much to overhaul, participants noted dissonance in determining what small changes can be made today in order to build a future that might look completely different. They also doubt having adequate resources to begin, in being unable to identify the right practical frameworks, methods, or tools to get started. Combined with the already-tight capacity constraints within most news organizations, that makes steps toward change feel out of reach for many.

Internal resistance runs deep. Participants described reporters and editors being stuck in traditional storytelling modes, facing pressure to “feed the beast” rather than rebuild systems, and organizational cultures that resist shifting from “journalism for” to “journalism with” communities. The prism of stories as solutions prevents newsrooms from providing actual utility.

Trust and relevance are intertwined. Multiple participants emphasized that usefulness requires trust, and many audiences simply don’t trust traditional journalism practitioners. Mismatches between coverage intentions and community needs compound the problem, as funding priorities often inform coverage choices and framing.

Where we go from here

All of the above presents a powerful combination of pressure and opportunity: “When the old system genuinely fails, it removes the safety net that keeps people from taking bold risks.” Removing a safety net that stifles direction around value and purpose can help surface gaps spanning tactics to strategy. 

The path forward requires greater intentionality of what we do, for whom, and why. To get there, we identified four opportunities:

1. Testing service-based pilots that directly address community needs with far greater specificity and are removed from the abstractions of article pages.
   
   
2. Creating collaborative approaches that break down silos between organizations so that audience agency and empowerment are furthered.
   
   
3. Building deeper, sustained community relationships instead of transactional ones through longer-term value proposition rooted in service.
   
   
4. Developing indicators that capture agency and empowerment rather than just reach or action.
   

We know there are promising beginnings of this work happening across the field. The challenge however, is doing this work at scale while navigating the existing systems that resist change. But we know that the industry’s future depends on closing the gap between publishing content and enabling more informed collective and individual action. Journalism can be so much more than it is today if we focus on the value and utility people actually receive from it, rather than our assumptions and projections onto it. In doing so, we can reverse what we found earlier – instead of setbacks being easier to name than opportunities, we can create a landscape where possibilities for genuine impact become more visible than the obstacles holding us back.

Our next workshop will present specific implementation strategies for newsrooms ready to move beyond theory on the four opportunities above. We want to explore how to operationalize service through jobs-to-be-done frameworks, develop value-based metrics, and create sustainable service models. Bring your ideas Sept. 25.

Register for our next workshop Register for our next workshop

Peer-recommended resources:

• Book: Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
• Organizations and initiatives: Sustainable Journalism Partnership, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate, and the Othering and Belonging Institute.
• Articles/frameworks: Anita Li’s “Action Journey” developed with The Green Line.
• Inspirational examples: Midcoast Villager, The Edinburgh Minute, Ipswich.co.uk, and “Don’t Mourn the Death of Alt-Weeklies. They’re Alive and Well“.

What we’ve been reading:

• Article/report: New report rethinks who creates the news and information communities need, by Anika Anand and Darryl Holliday
• Academic research: Jobs-to-Be-Done and Journalism Innovation: Making News More Responsive to Community Needs by Seth C. Lewis, Alfred Hermida and Samantha Lorenzo
• Articles/Academic research: Solidarity Journalism; Defining Social Justice and Superficial Solidarity vs Substantive Solidarity by Anita Varma
• Academic research: From Cultivating Fans to Coping With Troublemakers: A Typology of Journalists’ Audience Relationships: A Typology of Journalists’ Audience Relationships by Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer, Louise Oberhülsmann, and Tim van Olphen
• Webinar/frameworks: AIMS Framework in Research in the Face of Complexity: New Sensibility for New Situations

Special thanks to Joy Mayer, Shia Levitt, Rodney Gibbs, Linda Setchell and Emma Restrepo for helping us think through these learnings; and to Diana López, Joseph Lichterman, Hayley Slusser, and Tristan Loper for your trust and support.

Download a full PDF of the force field analysis here.