Guest Essay

Building safer, smarter audience engagement tools: Takeaways from the News Product Alliance Summit

By Meena Thiruvengadam 

November 18, 2025

For as long as I’ve worked in audience development, page views, likes, follows, shares, engaged time, and signups have been key markers of success. But for some audiences, visiting a website or engaging with it on social media is a safety threat, especially now.  

It’s a scenario journalists and audiences living and working under authoritarian regimes have long been forced to deal with, and it’s a growing concern in the United States, where a pro-Palestinian British journalist has been detained and had his visa revoked for views expressed online. 

My biggest takeaway from the News Product Alliance Summit: the traditional metrics of success may no longer apply. In a world where people can be barred from crossing borders because of a post or like online, newsrooms may have to rethink the way they measure success. They also may need to communicate potential threats to funders to explain why traditional metrics may not tell a full story. 

During a workshop on Audience Engagement Lessons from Journalists Working in Autocracies, our challenge was to find a way to disseminate news to an audience whose browsing, social media, and messaging activity was being closely monitored. My group decided that a voicemail system allowing audiences to call in for crucial news and information would be the best way to communicate with an audience subject to digital surveillance. 

We envisioned a simple home page with a phone number that audience members could call for recorded messages that would regularly be erased. To further shield audiences, we considered positioning these messages as coded weather reports. While we received positive feedback on the idea, the question is still bouncing around my head: How do we measure impact and success when the goal is to inform while minimizing the potential harm audiences may face for engaging with us? 

This is a question that feels increasingly urgent for journalists everywhere, not just in countries with strict censorship, but in communities where privacy, safety, free speech and media literacy are under threat. As the tools of repression evolve, so must the ways we define and evaluate meaningful connection with our audiences.

NPA Board Chair Upasna Gautam shared an insight that crystallized this challenge: “The biggest problem our industry faces is how often news organizations define success before they’ve done the work to understand their users. The best product teams in any industry let research shape the roadmap, not assumptions. Yet in many newsrooms, success still gets measured by metrics that were never designed for public-service products.”

Most news organizations look to lagging indicators like pageviews, subscriptions and revenue instead of the leading indicators that predict these outcomes. Instead, newsrooms should focus on how often readers return after their first visit, how deeply they engage with a story, how many people share feedback or sign up for a newsletter. 

“Those signals tell you whether you’re building real value, not just reach,” she said.

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism provided registration support for 20 Audience Community members attending the News Product Alliance’s first ever in-person summit. The goal was to ensure that people from across the industry, with a range of experiences and resources, can take part in conversations about how to build more equitable, sustainable, and resilient news products.

As product management consultant Madison Karas put it, “I’m walking away continuing to think about how we can create revenue streams that give newsrooms greater ownership of their infrastructure.”

That idea feels directly connected to the challenges we discussed in the workshop. If newsrooms can own more of their infrastructure, and rely less on platforms that expose their audiences to surveillance, censorship, or harm, they can begin to measure success on their own terms. 

In the end, that might be the real takeaway: creating journalism that values safety, trust, and independence as much as reach or engagement.