Local newsrooms have to pick a lane: A response to E&P’s newsroom debate

If the objective is reach, then volume, speed and breadth are logical priorities. If the objective is to inform a community in a meaningful way, the model necessarily looks different. It emphasizes specificity over scale, depth over frequency and consistency over cadence.”

Christian A. Hendricks, publisher and founder, Holly Springs Update

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A recent live E&P Reports panel discussion at the New York Press Services’ annual conference — later broadcast as a vodcast episode —posed a familiar question: Are we giving audiences what they want, or what they need? It is a fair question, and one that has been debated in newsrooms for years. But listening to the conversation makes it clear that the real issue lies just beneath the surface. It is not simply about audience preference. It is about whether a single newsroom model can realistically serve two very different objectives simultaneously.

The reality is this is no longer a question of balance. It is a question of choice. Newsrooms must decide what they are trying to do, because the model that supports reach is not the same as the model that builds trust.

On one side is reach. That means publishing more, moving faster, covering broadly and meeting audiences wherever they are. On the other is relevance. That means focusing on what matters, going deeper, explaining decisions and serving the people most directly affected. For a long time, many organizations have tried to balance those two approaches, pairing high-volume content with deeper reporting and hoping each would support the other.

In practice, that balance does not hold. Over time, the faster, easier work expands. The stories that can be turned quickly begin to take up more space, while the stories that require time, context and careful reporting compete for fewer resources. That shift is not a failure of discipline. It is structural. When success is measured broadly, the system naturally rewards what is easiest to produce and quickest to consume.

There have been days when the pressure to publish something — anything — is real. A slow news cycle, a gap in the schedule, the sense that there should be one more post, one more update. Those are the moments where the tradeoff shows up most clearly. Publish to fill space or wait until there is something worth saying.

That is when the real question shows up: What are you trying to do?

There is another way to approach this. Some local newsrooms, including Holly Springs Update in Holly Springs, North Carolina, are choosing to focus less on maximizing audience size and more on consistently informing the people most directly affected by local decisions. That includes coverage of town councils, school boards, county government, growth, taxes and infrastructure. These are the areas where policy and planning intersect with daily life, often in ways that are not immediately visible but become significant over time.

That does not mean ignoring everything else. Event calendars, real estate transactions, restaurant health inspections and local interest stories still play an important role in reflecting the broader life of a community. But they are not the foundation. The foundation is coverage of decisions, because that is where clarity has the greatest impact.

When that kind of information is delivered consistently, something else begins to happen. Residents do not simply read it and move on. They carry it with them into their daily lives. It surfaces in conversations at ballfields, in neighborhoods and in casual exchanges that evolve into more substantive discussions.

You see it most clearly after a story lands on a topic people are already thinking about. A recent piece on e-bike use in the community, an issue that has been coming up more frequently in neighborhoods and on greenways, was sent to just under 5,500 subscribers. It generated a 45% open rate and just under 5,200 total views. More than 2,700 readers arrived beyond the initial send, through shares, forwards and social distribution.

The story moved — not because it was part of a constant stream of content, but because the people it affected started talking about it, sharing it and using it to inform their own conversations.

That is how information begins to move through a community. It builds understanding first and, over time, trust. Not the kind of trust that comes from a single story or a spike in attention, but the kind that develops when information is repeated, discussed and confirmed in real-world experience. When what people read aligns with what they see and hear, and when it proves useful repeatedly, confidence in the source grows.

That kind of trust does not depend on constant publishing. Some weeks, there are stories every day. Other weeks, there are only one or two. The expectation does not need to be continuous output. It needs to be that when something is published, it matters.

One of the clearest signals of that is repeated behavior. Strong local newsletters often see open rates that reflect not just discovery, but habit. Readers are not just arriving once. They are returning because they expect something useful when they do. Some may discover a publication through a specific story or topic, but what keeps them is not volume. It is relevance.

Reach still matters. But how it is achieved matters more than how much is produced. Expanding distribution through newsletters, formats and consistent delivery can broaden awareness without sacrificing quality. What does not work is relying on low-value volume as the primary path to growth.

Viewed through that lens, the original question about what audiences want versus what they need begins to resolve itself. The more important question is whether a newsroom is willing to define its purpose clearly enough to let that definition guide its decisions.

If the objective is reach, then volume, speed and breadth are logical priorities. If the objective is to inform a community in a meaningful way, the model necessarily looks different. It emphasizes specificity over scale, depth over frequency and consistency over cadence.

That does not mean covering less. It means covering what matters with enough depth to be genuinely useful.

There are tradeoffs in that approach. It does not maximize traffic, and it passes on opportunities that might generate short-term attention elsewhere. But it also creates something more durable. It creates a place people can rely on to understand what is happening in their community.

The newsroom leaders in that panel are right to ask the question. It is an important one. But at some point, the question must lead to a decision.

What kind of journalism are you actually trying to produce?

Because once that is clear, the rest follows.

Christian A. Hendricks is the publisher & founder of Holly Springs Update, a digital-only news outlet serving a former news desert in North Carolina. He can be reached at christian.hendricks@hollyspringsupdate.com.