Nobody hired you

TL;DR:

• Success from journalism funding often assesses institutions by evaluating production, not by what those newsrooms’ work enables people to do.
• Many newsrooms, whether effective or not, cannot say precisely whose needs they meet or whether their work changes anything for anyone, in large part because journalism support structures do not demand validation.
• The jobs-to-be-done framework offers a method for opportunity and validation: ask which critical needs a newsroom addresses, for whom, and with what evidence.
• Specificity about population and need is a methodological strength, not a narrowing of ambition.

People do not hire newsrooms; they hire services to complete specific jobs, and those jobs are more varied than journalistic organizations’ strategy is typically designed to address. Newsrooms with vague missions to "put information in the hands of local citizens" often miss nuances (and opportunities) of desired jobs. 

Some are functional: understanding what a zoning decision means for their street, navigating a benefits system, verifying whether a rumor about a school closure is true. Some are psychological: making sense of a threatening situation, reducing the anxiety of not knowing, making sense of a confusing moral situation. Some are social: knowing what your neighbors know, having something to say, feeling connected to a place or a group. People move between these needs constantly, and the information that serves one does not necessarily serve another.

News funders predominantly operate with the same logic. They hire a newsroom expecting it to deliver specific societal outcomes on their behalf. Yet when the framework organizing that investment is built around preserving a particular institutional form, the container becomes the endpoint rather than what people can actually do with what it produces.

News funding has largely missed its own version of this dynamic. It often is focused on headcount, output volume, and institutional survival on the assumption that if the newsroom exists and publishes, the newsroom completes a civic function, whether increasing civic participation, engagement or something else. That assumption has always been shaky, and now the evidence of its failures are mounting. 

Dependent on where you sit, the pattern shows up differently – in the infrastructure funded, in how success gets measured, and in what skills get valued – but the underlying error is consistent: 

• In an analysis of 559 applications to Press Forward's infrastructure call, the field's “infrastructure” requests were dominated by organizational stabilization needs, rather than the shared systems that would actually lower the marginal cost of producing journalism at scale as the fund intended. 
• In the NJ Civic Information Consortium, a historic first investment of its type in the United States to use state-appropriated funds to support media in meeting underserved community needs, the success was measured by “positive anecdotal stories from viewers, to how many journalism awards won, or the number of newsletter subscriber sign-ups,” and recommended a more standardized and rigorous impact reporting approach.
• Craig Newmark, one of journalism's biggest philanthropists, pulled back on funding news ventures after seeing investments not being as "effective" as he'd like, noting that “audience development” was something few good journalists were aware of.

The problem this paper addresses is simple: The journalism field has tolerated newsrooms operating without a specific job they're completing, and funders have enabled it by letting their granting and support systems not question it.

In our work with more than 50 newsrooms and independent creators across four continents, over the past year, and throughout our own careers in newsrooms, we have found that some newsrooms know exactly whose needs they meet and how. However, most do not, and no matter what type of funding they receive, many institutions that fund them have stopped asking, or are peddling unrealistic narratives.

We propose that the people who decide where resources go – funders, foundation program officers, policymakers, and the founders and operators of news organizations seeking or making the case for support – use jobs-to-be-done as the lens for asking whether a given newsroom is meeting specific needs for specific people, and ask funders to require that lens when deciding what to support. 

The journalism field faces compounding technological, financial and political pressures. How it responds will determine whether it stays relevant to the people it claims to serve. In extreme constraint, funders have a heavy hand in setting early precedent for how media evolves and operates. While we address those allocating resources first, we believe the diagnostic logic and demand for validation we present have implications across the sector: a legacy newsroom asking which critical needs it reliably meets, for whom, and with what evidence, is doing the same work as a funder asking which grants to make.

Seeing needs as jobs 

What people use information for is dependent on their circumstances, relationships, pressures, and available resources. People do not "seek information" in generic terms, they seek data, directions, stories, sense-making and tools that information provides them to navigate the challenges and aspirations to achieve results in their lives.

The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework, put forward by Clayton Christensen and others and long used in business strategy, names this dynamic. People do not buy products; they hire them to get something done. When a product stops doing the job, they fire it and find one that will. Lewis, Hermida, and Lorenzo (2024) offered a useful scholarly recovery of the JTBD concept for journalism, tracing its brief and largely forgotten moment in industry practice via the 2006 Newspaper Next initiative, and arguing it still has not sufficiently taken hold in journalism research or newsroom strategy.

But the practitioner instinct has been there for a while. From grassroots to legacy organizations, the Black Press organized around it. The Membership Puzzle Project documented it. Outlier Media built around it. Product-oriented newsrooms have applied versions of it for years, often without calling it JTBD. The reason it struggles to scale is structural: A genuine service orientation tends to conflict with the universalist ambitions journalism institutions project outward and that funders cultivate and reward. An organization serving the specific information needs of a specific population cannot easily claim to serve grand notions of "the public." In grant applications, that specificity reads as a limitation rather than rigor. And for individual journalists, asking what you want an audience to do with information sits uneasily alongside a professional ethics built around the fourth estate ideal: inform, don't instrumentalize.

This is the contradiction our work keeps running into.

What people actually seek

The FCC's 2012 framework identified eight categories of critical information needs that people require to function in their lives: Emergencies and public safety, health, education, transportation, economic opportunity, the environment, civic and political life, and access to information broadly. These categories still hold up well across very different contexts. A family trying to understand whether their children qualify for a particular school program has a critical education-related need. A person navigating an economic crisis under an information blackout has urgent economic and safety needs that are not being met.

National and aggregated news demands the same specificity of defined needs and jobs. For example, a newsroom that recognizes and values both what it cannot provide --  the local, high-stakes coverage of local the school enrollment, individual benefits, etc. -- can better identify and serve what it can meaningfully provide: learn how your school enrollment policy changes affect your family in other places, how this change is a reflection of your region's recent elections, where are other places you could get better benefits, etc.

What changes across contexts is not the need, but the constraint. In a well-resourced local news market, a need might be addressed imperfectly by a combination of a local newspaper, a community Facebook group, fliers, and a well-placed phone call. In an exile context, the same need must be met across distance, under surveillance risk, through channels that may be blocked tomorrow. Constraint, specificity, and defining the perimeter of the need do not eliminate it. It intensifies it, and it exposes which service capabilities actually matter, and makes it more achievable to address.

Recognizing agency in information consumption

In a Service Desk workshop we ran in March 2026 with nine Philadelphia and South Jersey news organizations, journalists named the same gap in different words. One described reporting on a school board vote and immediately being asked by readers, "What can I do about this?" Another said they wanted to identify specific "information friction points" for residents rather than produce surface-level coverage. A third put it most plainly: the goal is not informed people; it is informed and empowered people. 

This brings us back to the limitation of the deterministic container of journalism institutions: the goal is not to build an institution that informs people in generic terms. The goal is to build an institution that informs and enables people to make decisions based on the information. Journalism's job is not fixed with the end product it creates; it competes in what people are able to do with what they learn. Publishing content can create awareness, but there’s no direct causality. Information services rooted in information needs are closer to this causality and are more likely to equip people to act on what they learn.

Especially for funders, the distinction matters: equipping people to act means providing the information, tools, and context that make their own decisions more informed and not making decisions for them or substituting for the institutions that do. This is advocacy for a person, not a specific change. This requires funders who are supporting journalism institutions and ventures to clarify their desired outcomes against those of the newsrooms: Is the information production being supported because it's assumed to lead to an end change, or because it gives people the power to make the changes they desire?

That space between awareness and agency is exactly where the JTBD framing is useful. The difference between "City Council approves budget amendment" and "here's how to enroll in the new program the city approved for your neighborhood" is not a question of journalistic quality. It is a question of whether a need gets met and agency is created. The shift in framing is from "we produced" to "people can now."  That measurement is independent of content type, format or delivery method – it is not judged by “Did this piece of content contribute to a library of short form videos on civic engagement?”, it’s measured by “Can people sufficiently use this information to better navigate their circumstances?”. 

Constraint, specificity, and defining perimeters of who and how they are served hold here as well. Newsroom teams often operate with genuine intentions to serve the public, but gaps emerge when sweeping claims about meeting all community information needs crowd out specificity and distance institutions from the concrete work those communities actually need. We can see this in how institutions describe themselves through about us language:

A local newsroom, Mississippi Free Press, uses language more for awareness, describing itself as:

“The mission of the Mississippi Free Press, a nonprofit journalism website and multimedia network that launched in March 2020, is to publish deep public-interest reporting into causes of and solutions to the social, political and structural challenges facing all Mississippians and their communities. Mississippians need to know each other across regions and share our challenges and solutions despite geographic and other differences. We are introducing Mississippians to each other through our deep accountability reporting and compelling people-focused storytelling, and by convening online and physical “solutions circles,” using our statewide networks to ensure inclusivity and representation.”

In this case, the newsroom emphasizes the type of journalism created, knowledge gained, and values pursued by doing so.

Whereas a local newsroom, Moab Sun News, uses language in “What We Stand For” stating:

“We equip, not just inform. Reporting the news isn't enough. We build tools — resource guides, public records trackers, document archives — so you can dig deeper on your own. When we cover a government meeting, we link to the agenda. When we file a GRAMA [public records] request, we show you how to file your own. Our job isn't to be the only ones who know what's going on. It's to make sure you can find out, too.”

In this case, the newsroom focuses on the actions readers are empowered to take.

When need assumptions go wrong

The hardest part of a needs-centered funding logic is that most funding decisions already claim to be needs-centered. The problem is not that funders ignore need; it is that they accept need assumptions that have never been validated and enable grantees to operate on good intentions rather than evidence. And as newsrooms continually compete for grant awards, the messaging grows more grandiloquent and ambitious, producing persistent logical fallacies that use traditional journalism ethos and good intentions to lend false legitimacy to the needs they claim to address. 

Three recur most often:

"People in news deserts need information."

This is almost certainly true in the aggregate and almost useless as a funding rationale. A news desert is defined by the absence of a supply-side institution, not by any documented pattern of unmet need. The two are related but not equivalent. People in news deserts have access to information through many channels (regional outlets, national digital media, social networks, neighbor networks, community organizations, etc.) and the gaps in that patchwork are specific, not global. Knowing that a county lost its newspaper tells you that a particular production infrastructure is gone. It does not tell you which critical needs are now unmet, for whom, or whether the lost outlet was actually meeting them before it closed. Funding to restore a news desert without first documenting what specific needs are unresolved conflates institutional loss with civic harm. Sometimes they coincide, but often they do not.

"People should be informed about [X]."

Civic journalism's deepest assumption is that there is a class of information the public ought to have, such as about how their local democratic institutions work, and that the job of journalism is to provide it regardless of whether the public is actively seeking it. The assumption is not wrong as an ethical proposition. As a service hypothesis, it is almost impossible to validate, and it systematically displaces the question of what people are actually trying to do – even merit goods need to operate in constraints. When a newsroom covers a city council meeting because citizens should know what their government is doing, it may well be right. But "should know" is a claim about what information the newsroom thinks matters, not about what job a specific person is trying to complete in their lives. Claims to the contrary only risk further alienating people from institutions they don’t feel served by. The coverage may inform no one who acts on it. Funding tied to "should be informed" claims without any mechanism for validating uptake or use is effectively funding a production norm rather than a civic outcome. The “merit good” argument for journalism as a positive societal benefit is not wrong, the problem is that the argument has become a substitute for validation rather than a starting point for it.

"Democratic participation requires an informed public."

This is the grandest version of the above, and the most insulated from accountability. The argument runs: Journalism supports democracy; democracy requires an informed citizenry; therefore, funding journalism is funding democracy. The logical structure is real. But the distance between funding a specific newsroom and producing a meaningfully more informed and participatory citizenry is enormous, and almost never examined. The democratic rationale is treated as self-evidencing: If the newsroom exists and publishes, the civic function is assumed to follow. Funders who genuinely care about democratic participation should want to know whether the work they fund is producing more people who understand their options, show up to proceedings, file public records requests, or navigate government services successfully, or genuinely feel more connected to their communities. If it is not, the democratic rationale is doing rhetorical work, not descriptive work.

None of this requires funders to abandon democratic ideals. The goals are worth pursuing. What changes is the evidentiary standard. A funder committed to democratic participation can still back ambitious work, but they can demand that grantees specify which democratic function they are supporting, the local conditions that make this intervention worthwhile, for which population, and what would count as evidence that it is working. That demand is not a narrowing of ambition. It is the difference between pursuing a goal and performing one unchecked.

Value in the eye of the beholder

This reframe has implications for how we think about newsrooms themselves. Megan Lucero and Cole Goins (Journalism + Design Lab at The New School) identify a set of roles that people perform in creating information: documenting, commenting, inquiring, sensemaking, amplifying, navigating, enabling, and listening and facilitating. These roles exist in every population, regardless of whether a formal newsroom does. People already perform acts of journalism, often without calling it that, because they have needs that are not being met elsewhere.

A newsroom, in this light, is not best understood as an institution that produces content and distributes it to a passive audience. It is better understood as a group of people who get together, pool skills and resources, and jointly work to meet critical information needs more effectively than any one of them could alone. The distinction between "the newsroom" and "the creator" or "the community journalist" matters less than whether the critical information roles are being performed and whether people can use what is being produced to navigate their lives. Like in traditional hiring, it’s who’s the best candidate for the job. 

This applies to traditional roles and “jobs” of newsrooms, too. Accountability reporting and coverage of political and socioeconomic power and processes retain their service value, but are not treated as a given. Watchdog journalism matters because it helps people navigate power structures in their constituencies. Coverage of democratic institutions matters when people can use them and make sense of their implications. General knowledge journalism has value when it answers a frequent question that no other affirmative source can. But in all these cases, the same remains true: they are not a valuable service on their own; they are valuable because of what it does for someone. This is what’s gotten lost in the funding conversation, often amid anxiety over an ever less democratic future. Many long-treasured forms of journalism have gone unchecked in their service over time and are assumed to be validated by heritage rather than by function and evidence. These can be preserved through a rebalancing of demonstrated capability; it does not require abandoning the watchdog function. It requires being honest about which work is doing which job, and funding each accordingly.

This matters for policy because the current civic funding logic measures the wrong thing. Impact is not whether a newsroom exists. Impact is not whether it has staff, publishes regularly, or reaches a certain audience size. Impact is whether the critical information needs of specific people are being met, whether the roles Lucero and Goins describe are being performed for service rather than expression, and whether people can actually complete the jobs those needs represent. A richly staffed newsroom that produces content nobody uses to make decisions has not produced civic impact. A scrappy operation that reliably helps hundreds of people navigate a specific high-stakes situation every month has.

From institution funding to capability funding

The practical implication is a shift in what funders back. Instead of funding newsrooms as institutional entities and hoping impact follows, funders could identify the specific critical information needs that matter most for a given population, validate whether those needs are currently being met, and fund the capabilities required to meet them, regardless of whether delivery happens through a legacy newsroom, a community organization, an individual journalist, or some combination.

This is an argument for clarity about what newsrooms actually aim to achieve: enabling people to make better decisions with the information they produce. An organization that can demonstrate it is reliably meeting high-priority critical information needs for specific people has a much stronger claim on public and philanthropic resources than one that produces volume, maintains headcount, and generates engagement metrics that say little about whether anyone's life got meaningfully easier. 

This is not an argument for all journalism to advocate for causes or change, but rather for people. Being clear about the outcomes we pursue in journalism, enabling people to make better decisions through the information we produce, defines and protects our journalism's scope. News organizations that value the autonomy and agency people derive from information can more meaningfully define and find their place in meeting the information-seeking needs of the people they serve. It also separates newsrooms from agents (whether bad actors, lobbyists, or funders with specific pursuits) who insert agendas, propaganda, or specific changes they wish to see from people served. Outcome clarity is not funder-subservient advocacy.

Measurement follows from this reframe. Output metrics, stories published, staff employed, and unique visitors reached are upstream proxies. Outcomes are what those proxies are supposed to predict: did the person understand their options, navigate the situation, resolve the uncertainty, complete the job? In most cases, the connection between output and outcome is assumed rather than demonstrated. The workshop participants we work with at the Service Desk consistently find that once they articulate a specific service hypothesis, "we believe that [this person] has the problem that [this specific thing], and we will address it by [this specific intervention]," they realize they have no data on whether anyone can actually complete the task. They have been tracking production, not outcomes.

The field's current ecosystem logic, which celebrates the existence and sustainability of news outlets as ends in themselves, reinforces this problem. When ecosystem health is measured by outlet counts, staff numbers, and publication frequency, assumptions go unchallenged, risking the further exacerbation of the growing irrelevance of journalistic ventures. None of these tells you whether the critical information roles are being performed or whether specific people can use what is being produced. An ecosystem of struggling outlets that collectively fail to meet the most pressing critical information needs of the people nominally in their coverage area is not a healthy ecosystem by any meaningful measure.

Three cases, one framework

The three newsrooms below are seen through this lens: three people in different contexts navigating the challenge of inherited generalist journalistic ambitions and finding concrete jobs to pursue. One could not name its job until it was pushed to. One knew its job clearly but buried it in institutional language. One is bumping against a universalist public media mandate that treats specificity as a narrowing of scope. In each, we ask the same two things: whose needs the work meets, and what evidence exists that it does. Below are suggestions on how funders can investigate the same for the ventures they support.

The Jiffy: when the job is not functional

Content format ≠ job done

James Cave left a senior editorial role at Yahoo to build something independently in Columbia County, in New York's Hudson Valley. His project, The Jiffy, combines a newsletter, podcast, and short documentary video series about its farms, its architecture, its history, and its ecology. Two years in, he had a loyal audience, a high email open rate, and no clear path to converting readers to paying subscribers. The problem was not quality. It was that he could not say, with precision, what job his work was doing for people.

The Hudson Valley is not underserved for media. Lifestyle magazines, nonprofit newsrooms, legacy papers, and a growing field of local newsletters and social media creators all compete for the same regional attention. Cave's instinct, trained by years in editorial roles, was to differentiate on format and craft. He does slow documentary work and long-form series that others don't. But format is not a job. He didn't have a clean answer on what need he met that others didn't

The diagnosis emerged gradually, through contact with readers rather than strategic planning. Describing his work to scientists, naturalists, and other residents attending a Robin Wall Kimmerer lecture, he reached for a different framing than usual, calling it a newsletter about "the arts and sciences of the Hudson Valley," almost like “a museum.”  It landed in a way his standard description never had. Looking back at what had actually resonated with his audience, a pattern emerged: a year-long documentary series following a vineyard through its seasons, an investigation into the Dutch colonial roots of Hudson Valley domestic architecture, and a curated interactive map of antique shops organized around local history and design. None of this was breaking news. None of it was civic navigation in the conventional sense. But it was doing something consistent for people: making their relationship to where they live more legible, more layered, more worth inhabiting.

The job, stated plainly, is something like: help me understand why this place is significant, and feel more rooted in it. That sits toward the high-brow end of what information services typically claim to provide. It is not functional in the way that benefits navigation or school enrollment information is functional. But it is real and specific enough to test. Cave's antiques map was the clearest evidence: readers sought it out, shared it, and used it to discover places they then visited. They were not consuming content. They were seeking completion of a job and chose to hire him for it.

The implication for how Cave thinks about his work is direct. Advice that independent creators succeed by building audience connection to their personality locates the value in the wrong place. Personality is a delivery mechanism, not a job. What his audience is actually hiring The Jiffy to do is provide access to a place through a particular kind of attention and discovery: slow, historically grounded, aesthetically serious, unearthing something they don’t know about the place they spend their day-to-day. That is a service that can be articulated, tested against specific audiences, refined based on what resonates, and eventually monetized, not because people like Cave, but because his work reliably does something for them that nothing else in their information environment does.

The JTBD frame does not privilege civic function over cultural function, or legacy newsrooms over independent creators. It asks the same question of all of them: what can people do, or feel, or understand, that they couldn't before? Cave's answer of feeling more rooted in a place worth knowing is a legitimate and testable response.

Initium Media: knowing exactly who you serve

Narrow scope ≠ weakness

Initium Media is now eleven years old, stateless in any meaningful sense, and caters to Chinese-speaking subscribers across mainland China, Taiwan, and the Chinese-speaking diaspora around the world. It has won over 100 global journalism awards, but its initial growth has long plateaued.

When then editor-in-chief Lulu Ning began a systematic listening effort two years ago, she started where most newsrooms start: with data. The profile that emerged was that Initium's U.S. audience is concentrated among highly educated Chinese Americans aged 25 to 45, most of whom came for education, stayed for careers, and have been in the country for less than fifteen years. The group is hard to count precisely, but some estimates suggest around a million people.

The first assumption she tested was whether they still wanted Chinese-language media at all. English access was not the constraint. This is a population that functions in English professionally. What she found instead was a set of jobs English media was structurally unable to do.

Trustworthy reporting on China was one. English outlets lack access and tend to treat China as a foreign-policy topic rather than a place where people have families and histories. But the more revealing finding was about something closer to home: Readers described feeling estranged from mainstream US media — positioned as outsiders, subjected to coverage that rendered their communities invisible or incidental. "The news here is just too white," one said. When Taiwan experienced an earthquake, American coverage focused on semiconductor supply chains. The need being expressed was not just for information about China. It was for coverage that treated their lives as the subject, not the backdrop.

This is a precise JTBD diagnosis. The job is not "stay informed about Chinese affairs." The job is closer to: make sense of my life as a Chinese person living in the U.S., in a media environment that does not see me clearly. English language media often cannot do that job. Mainland Chinese state media cannot do it either, for different reasons. Initium's positioning (independent, Chinese-language, committed to accountability standards that enable trust) is not a niche limitation. It is the specific capability the job requires.

What Ning found in California confirmed this: Readers at offline meetups described feeling vulnerable, wanting journalism that could reduce that vulnerability. They wanted to participate, not just consume (e.g. one offered to volunteer coding skills; a group wanted to publish their own magazine). The audience was not waiting to be informed. They were looking for infrastructure to build a public sphere of their own.

The implication for funding logic is direct. An outlet serving this population cannot easily claim to serve "the public." It serves a specific million people with specific unmet needs that the broader media system is not designed to address. In a grant application, it reads as a narrow scope. By the framework this paper argues for, it reads as a validated need, a capable institution, and a clear service hypothesis worth backing.

CBC Alberta: the universalism trap in public media

Public interest ≠ trying to reach everyone at once

In January 2026, CBC engagement producer Elise Stolte emailed Alberta’s 23,000 teachers, sending a questionnaire about classroom conditions to every public-facing email address she could find on school websites. The context was a teachers' strike that had ended without resolution, with educators ordered back to work under a legal mechanism rarely used in Canada. Many felt their voice had been removed from a debate directly affecting their daily lives.

The response rate was extraordinary. More than 6,000 educators replied. The open-ended question asking teachers to describe classroom complexity to a friend or neighbour produced 4,701 responses. The final question asked what teachers would report on if they were journalists for a week and generated 455 pages of written answers. Stolte had read through a third of them and reported that every time she returned to the material, new story ideas emerged.

What the project produced, in JTBD terms, was an unusually precise map of unmet needs. From the responses, a set of distinct jobs became visible: Some teachers wanted accurate witness (not advice, not policy analysis) but confirmation that what they were experiencing was real and shared. Others needed language: a way to explain their classroom reality to people outside it, whether parents, administrators, or politicians who had never spent a day managing thirty children with complex needs and no support staff. 

The insight had an interesting correlation with a series of empathy interviews and focus groups she had done earlier with parents. There was a shared longing to be understood, seen and included, to have one's insight valued within a system that can feel top-down and removed. That identifies a specific job, a specific population with a specific unmet need. 

Stolte recognized this, and has already begun acting on it. Her newsroom's education coverage grew measurably stronger through the listening process, resulting in stories that have been shared widely on teachers' social media accounts. And she's designing the next phase of their education engagement to serve that shared need for agency. She's hoping to take issues flagged by the teachers, create plain-language backgrounders of the educational context, then create opportunities for parents to share from their experience.

A previous housing project, using a similar engagement approach, produced reporting that earned an award nomination. Her argument is not that public media cannot do this work. It is that the field sometimes lacks the language and measurement tools to bake it into the core job rather than a supplement to it.

The constraint she names is systemic, not specific to her newsroom. Public media mandates are defined in universalist terms, and serving a specific population well can read inside that logic as a narrowing of scope. What her projects demonstrate is the opposite: that specificity generates richer audience insight, stronger journalism, and more transferable methodology than broad coverage ever could.

The challenge is defining who to serve. So far, Stolte has done this by structuring engagement as a series of projects, building relationships and identifying JTBD first with one group and then another. More sustainable results could come from defining engagement not as a separate project layer but as a better way of doing a beat, she says. It requires building the language and showing the outcomes. 

This is exactly what a service-oriented, JTBD-rooted funding logic would recognize and reward. The need is validated. The audience is identified and engaged. The methodology transfers. What Stolte's work demonstrates is that the gap between public interest and serving specific people is not a contradiction. That would be a false choice produced by the wrong measurement frame. A public media outlet that reliably helps Alberta's teachers understand their options, navigate policy changes, and find peer knowledge is serving the public through the people who shape the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of children. Specificity is not a retreat from public responsibility. It is how public responsibility gets discharged effectively.

Note: The three cases are not presented as a hierarchy. A subscription-funded diaspora outlet, an independent creator, and a public broadcaster face the same diagnostic question: which critical needs does this work address, for whom, and how do we know? The comparison is methodological: we use it to separate need patterns that recur across contexts from context-specific constraints that shape delivery and measurement. What looks like a unique problem in an exile context often turns out to be a more visible version of a problem every local newsroom has, but can more easily ignore.

What this means for policy

Three things follow from this reframe.

1) Philanthropic funders should require demonstrable capability tied to validated critical needs.

The question before any significant commitment should be "which critical needs does this work address, for whom, and how do we know?" Critical needs should be specific and articulated from a target audience's lived experiences, not prescribed ideals from institutions.

This is not an argument against institutions. Institutions matter for training, for pooling resources and attention, and for building the kind of sustained presence that trust requires. The argument is that institutional survival should follow from demonstrated capability, not precede it. Whether it is funding old or new models, the logic is the same: neither incumbency nor novelty substitutes for evidence. Just as “innovation is not infrastructure,” infrastructure is not innovation either. Just because a newly designed newsroom program is being built, does not mean that it will meet the needs better, differently, or at all. The evidence is still required.

2) Evaluation should shift from outputs to outcomes.

A lightweight validation protocol before major public investments would prevent a significant proportion of wasted resources. Validation does not require elaborate research infrastructure. It requires honest conversations with people about what information problems they face, what they have tried, and what is still unresolved, before money flows toward a solution that may address none of it. 

3) Funders should examine whether their own reporting requirements actively discourage specificity.

Grants structured around reach, volume, and demographic breadth create incentives to stay vague about who is being served and why. Specificity about population and need is a methodological strength, not a narrowing of ambition. Work that reliably helps specific people meet one high-priority critical information need is more valuable, and more honest about its value, than work that claims to serve everyone and can demonstrate it for no one.

The field has the frameworks. The practitioner's impulse is clearly there. What is missing is a funding logic that rewards meeting needs rather than producing more content, perpetuating institutions, or making unvalidated claims about impact. 

The Service Desk is Gazzetta’s applied service design practice for civic media, led by Madison Karas and Patrick Boehler. We have worked with 50+ newsrooms and independent creators across four continents, using service design to move news and information businesses from good intentions to actionable strategy for the people they serve. Reach us at servicedesk@gazzetta.xyz. 

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