Re:filtered #13: Thoughts on this moment and research on how people share news

Welcome to the 13th edition of my monthly newsletter on civic media opportunities in a moment of systemic disruption.

I want to start by acknowledging the uncertainty, pain and fear many subscribers of this newsletter are experiencing this week because of the radical freeze of international media development funding by the United States.

If you have been affected, and want to talk, claim a slot in my calendar. I've opened more slots for the next few weeks. Feel free to email me or message me on Signal. Believe me, you're not alone. I've been talking to people non-stop the past few days.

To me, this moment represents a second major wake-up call for our industry in a generation. The first came when social platforms scaled back their media funding.

Now, with the freeze of the largest funder globally, we face another pivotal moment forcing us to rethink how journalism, the craft, can be sustained. I assume many readers are like me reflecting on what to make of this moment. I would love to hear from you to help me in my thinking.

My heart goes out to the many passionate idealists who entered this field believing in its transformative power and now may have to find new paths to pursue. So many journalists have dedicated themselves – sometimes at great personal risk – to work that they were told would make a difference, and now see it go away.

There's now a massive need for alternative funding to keep the lights on in newsrooms globally. (If you want to help, let me know and I'd be happy to direct you to meaningful teams.)

But it's also a moment of collective failure. For too long, it was enough to deliver grandiose narratives rather than developing validated services that directly benefit people.

In the long run, I don't think seeking alternative funding in Brussels or elsewhere is a way out of this current dilemma. First, we need to come to terms with irrelevance, with the fact that random publishing doesn't achieve much, and rebuild from there, with intention.

Another lesson is, perhaps counterintuitively, moving away from aspiring to succeed in the attention economy. When we say journalism struggles as a market failure, we're really talking about the commodified "content" market.

That's gone, largely hijacked for now, disrupted for good. Yet, there's still opportunity for information services that genuinely help people navigate their lives.

The key lies in competing in the right market – not for attention, but for utility to individuals and communities. This could include both commercial models and thoughtfully structured public funding that preserves an editorial focus on public utility.

It means letting go of editorial independence as a concept of publishing whatever we deem to be important but rooting it in a theory of service that fearlessly and with dedication provides information that's helpful to people in navigating their lives.

We've lost our way. It's time to find it again, and rebuild, slowly.

In this spirit, this month's newsletter is about sharing – not the performative public kind encouraged by social platforms, but the genuine passing along of information that matters from one person to another.

My interest in this had originally been sparked by my earlier work building Telegram followings for the New York Times in China, and for the often domestically-banned newsrooms at Radio Free Europe.

More than a hundred thousand people subscribed to the Telegram channels of my (amazing) Belarusian colleagues during the protests that followed the rigged 2020 elections, and then gradually unsubscribed as the protests were crushed and subsided. Many working in Russian media are seeing similar patterns occur.

What started as a survival strategy for exiled newsrooms has become central to media reality, and increasingly strategy, everywhere. Just last month, I had a conversation with the CEO of a Scandinavian member-funded newsroom that proved this point. (Thank you for organizing, P.)

He shared that they have basically given up entirely on subscriber acquisition through paid social media marketing. Their focus is now on two channels: word-of-mouth and social influencers.

This got me thinking that I need to really dig deeper into the motivations of genuine person-to-person information sharing.

You can download my literature review here, and I prepared a research guide if you want to dig deeper in your own context. (I used Elicit, strongly recommending it as a research tool).

Overall, the research challenges a fundamental assumption about how information spreads:

News sharing isn't the viral phenomenon we often imagine, where engagement leads to more engagement, like a psychological stampede. That's more a question of platform architecture of algorithmic surfacing of content, not an underlying human motivation.

As this 2017 study argues, we should look at news sharing as an intricate social process where people make careful, strategic decisions about what to share with whom.

Think about the last time you shared a news article with someone. Chances are you didn't just hit "share" because an algorithm suggested it or because it had lots of likes. You likely thought about whether that specific piece would be valuable to that particular person or group.

"Let's Hate Together", a 2018 study by Danielle Lottridge and Frank R. Bentley showed that private sharing through messaging apps isn't about broadcasting - it's about carefully selecting content based on what you know about the recipient's interests and context.

In private messaging, sharing is more often motivated by the desire to maintain relationships, as the sharer is often thinking of the specific recipient. People shared political content more often on public platforms, while sharing uplifting content equally across both public and private channels.

Antonis Kalogeropoulos' 2020 study across the US, UK, Germany, and Brazil found people increasingly gravitating toward private messaging apps specifically to avoid "context collapse" – that uncomfortable mixing of different social circles that happens on public social media. They're seeking more intimate, controlled spaces where they can share meaningful content with specific audiences.

These are social experiences.

According to Lorraine Y.C. Wong and Jacquelyn Burkell's 2017 "Motivations for Sharing News on Social Media," the primary drivers are to inform and entertain, but they also listed social motivations:

• to maintain connections and strengthen interpersonal relationships;
• to initiate a discussion and to change minds;
• to distinguish oneself and craft a personal brand (e.g. the first to break news, to be at the forefront of a trend);
• to feel part of a larger group;

Other studies, drawing on the Uses and Gratifications Theory, listed similar psychological motivations. Its decades-old scheme of five social and psychological needs met by media maintains some validity:

• Cognitive needs, or the need to acquire information and knowledge;
• Affective needs, or the need to have aesthetic or emotional experiences;
• Integrative needs, or the need to strengthen confidence, status, or credibility;
• Social integrative needs, or the need to strengthen relationships;
• Tension-release needs, or the need to relax and escape by lessening one's awareness of the self;

Back when I was using Crowdtangle (Meta's now-sunset social metrics tool) as a digital editor in newsrooms, we experimented with different weighting systems for social interactions. We sometimes gave higher weighting to shares over likes and comments in our ranking dashboards.

Even then, we sensed that sharing represented a deeper level of engagement – it required someone to put their own reputation on the line by amplifying content to their network as part of their identity.

Now as social sharing turns more private, many newsrooms make a fundamental mistake in how they approach messaging apps – they treat these intimate communication channels just like any public social platforms.

Yet, the research clearly shows that the psychology and social dynamics of private messaging are entirely different from public social media sharing. Private messaging is about relationships – each share is a deliberate choice based on advancing personal connections.

These findings suggest several key strategic shifts for media organizations:

Consider social needs

As shown in the several studies above and others, including this research on COVID-19 information sharing in Pakistan, people share news not just for information but also for social connection, status, and to help others. Content strategy could reflect these motivations.

Understanding that information sharing serves both practical and social functions can help design more effective ways to serve communities. This requires moving beyond thinking of our work as purely informational to seeing it as part of broader social processes, e.g. care for friends in a moment of crisis or an investment in a friend’s aspirations.

Design for adding value to existing conversations

Create content that fits naturally into how people actually share information – whether at dinner tables, in private messages, or through group chats. This means thinking beyond the initial publication format to consider how information might be discussed, shared in messaging apps, or passed along through other community networks.

The most effective content is designed not just for consumption but for non-public circulation within existing social structures. A very simple example I found to work well at RFE was making video productions more easily downloadable so that they could be more easily shared as files on WhatsApp and Telegram.

Contribute to relationship infrastructure

It's really hard to create new spaces where community members can naturally share and discuss information that matters to them, but it's perhaps easier to contribute to existing ones and help them thrive, providing incremental returns on network building to conveners.

Discord and Matrix are great examples of what can happen when communities can engage with information on their own terms, rather than being passive recipients of institutional broadcasting. Also, see for instance the PublicSpaces collective in the Netherlands (h/t New_Public).

Build a new generation of publishing technologies

Our current publishing tools were built for broadcasting, not for facilitating the sharing in personal networks. They are optimized for discoverability on search engines or scheduling posts on various social platforms, but don't support how information naturally flows through human networks of trust.

Most newsrooms that do publish on messaging channels have to do this on individual phones and via a myriad of individually managed-channels, exposing them to security risks and fatigue. There are solutions out there, like CDR Link or beabee could help bridge this gap.

These tools could easily evolve from facilitating broadcasts to supporting how trusted information naturally flows between people. Newsletters are just a start. The fediverse offers immense promise.

The next frontier in civic media technology isn't just about reaching more people – it's about enabling the convening of multitudes.

Rethink measurement

We need more effective ways of tracking how information moves through communities and influences real decisions.

How? I don't know.

Ideas? Let me know!

If we can build the right infrastructure and develop the right publishing strategies to support and meaningfully contribute natural patterns of information sharing, we might be able to take advantage of a snowball effect of relevant, trusted, person-to-person communication – something more powerful than any broligarch algorithm.

The research suggests real opportunity if we can get it right.

An example: In "The Personal Is the Political?", Sebastián Valenzuela et al. (2019) studied WhatsApp usage in Chile during the 2017 elections.

Their survey research found information sharing on the messaging service was equally effective across social groups, i.e. this is not an elite phenomenon. Their follow-up survey also suggested that it improved political knowledge and participation across social groups.

Unlike viral content that spreads widely but impacts shallowly, information that moves through networks of trust and pre-existing relationships tends to stick and influence behavior much more. When someone receives news from a friend who thought specifically of them, it carries weight that few algorithm-driven feeds can match.

The challenge ahead isn't primarily technical – we know how to build secure messaging systems and community platforms and how to build them in ways that don't exacerbate hatred (at least in theory).

The real innovation needed is in reimagining how journalism is not competing for attention in the algo-fueled wastelands, but delivers real utility and can flow naturally through human networks of trust.

Finally, the literature review led me to a wonderful definition of "news value" by Inyoung Park and Daeho Lee.

News value has two parts, they write: social significance and audience relevance.

The first factor that we considered is social significance, which implies that news items have social impact. This perspective assumes that the social wave of an event must exceed a certain degree of influence before it is worth reporting. Second, relevance to the audience is a concept related to meaningful events that can prompt communication among users. This value is cited as the main concept of value for online news, which transcends spatial barriers and is involved in events that are perceived as physically, psychologically, and culturally relevant.

Think about that second part for a moment – it fundamentally shifts agency to the consumer. If journalism doesn't prompt real conversations, if it doesn't give people something worth discussing with others, maybe it really has no inherent value.

Yet journalism schools still largely focus on social significance while neglecting audience relevance, even though we now have established tools and concepts for understanding both.

The minimalist front page of Will Media, an Italian digital media venture that has long inspired me, offers an answer to this. They invite readers to choose stories with a beautifully simple question: "What story are you planning to dazzle them with at dinner tonight?"

That question captures something profound about how meaningful information actually spreads – not through algorithms or viral mechanics, but through intimate moments of trust. One person turns to another over a meal and says "Hey, I thought you should know about this."

It's a much higher bar than clickability. But it might be the standard we need if journalism is to regain its role in society – not by chasing reach, but by creating value worth sharing between people who trust each other.

Looking Back

At a recent search engine optimization (SEO) workshop, someone shared this fascinating study on "Generative Engine Optimization". It is part of an interesting conversation among SEO nerds on the implications of AI-first search landscape to content discovery.

The key shift is that generative engines use large language models to understand and synthesize content in a more sophisticated way compared to traditional keyword-based search engines.

The study suggests that new ranking factors could actually help make the internet less generic and more user-friendly, incentivizing readability, relevant statistics, authoritative quotes, and – most excitingly – unique value additions.

And this marketing podcast challenged my thinking on analytics and the established funnel conceptualization of digital metrics. It taught me about „mental availability“ and „physical availability“ as consumption factors.

Looking Ahead

I've opened some extra coaching/check-in slots for February. If they're taken and you want to talk, just send me a note.

If you're going to RightsCon in Taipei and interested in informal audience research conversations, let me know. (I'll be sharing my presentation decks in the next edition.)

In March, I'll be back in Prague. In April, I'll be at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. In May, to the Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Summit in Baltimore to share some of our work, and some audience research tools. If you're going, let me know.

That's it from me this month. Thank you for reading – and perhaps sharing – these thoughts.

Take care, especially those of you navigating difficult transitions right now.