What audiences want vs. what they need: E&P Reports on the road at NY Press

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E&P Reports went on the road as Mike Blinder hosted a live panel at the New York Press Service’s annual spring conference in Saratoga Springs. Joined by newsroom leaders Casey Seiler, Walter Sanchez and Kirstyn Brendlen, along with voices from the audience, the discussion tackled a question at the heart of modern journalism: are we delivering the news audiences want — or the news they truly need?

Speed is no longer enough

As local newsrooms face pressure to publish faster, post more often and reach audiences across more platforms, three New York newsroom leaders said the real question is not whether cadence matters, but what kind of journalism is produced at that pace. For Kirstyn    Brendlen, editor at Schneps Media, the answer is not simple. “I don’t know,” she said when asked whether publishing more frequently is helping journalism or hurting it. “Torn. I know that publishing more frequently brings more people to our website.” But Brendlen also warned that filling the site simply because “we just really need something” rarely produces work that serves readers well. “You’re really never going to get much that’s good out of that,” she said.        

Walter Sanchez, publisher and editor of the Queens Ledger, Greenpoint Star and BQE Media, was more direct about the value of frequency. “Oh, it’s definitely helping us, because it’s more of a chance for new people to see what’s going on,” he said. Still, he acknowledged that frequency has to be weighed against the labor and revenue behind it. His organization produces “a morning ticker and an afternoon news flash where we do 20 stories in 20 words or less,” but is considering ending the afternoon version because “the income is not there to really support the time.”

Casey Seiler, editor-in-chief of the Albany Times Union, said the value of cadence depends entirely on what fills it. “It depends on what it’s a cadence of,” he said. “It’s like asking a restaurant if a $5 entrée is going to increase business. It depends on what you’re giving people for $5. Is it a hot dog, or is it a sirloin steak?” For Seiler, publishing more often can help, but only if the product is not “thin gruel,” including “police blotter rewrites, or chicken dinner press release rewrites.”

Trust is built by playing for big stakes

The panelists agreed that quick-hit stories may bring traffic, but deeper reporting remains central to a newsroom’s identity. Seiler was blunt about the danger of letting easy content dominate. “The gold standard of what it is we do is stories that surprise, inform, delight when appropriate or enrage people by telling them something about their community that they do not know,” he said. That kind of journalism, he added, is “not police blotter stuff.”

Brendlen said enterprise work remains essential, even when it is harder to package and does not always perform predictably. “To me, that’s kind of the bread and butter,” she said. “That’s the stuff that I would do entirely if it were possible.” She pointed to a recent story about issues at a Catholic school in Brooklyn that “got 15,000 reads in 48 hours,” even though “that story took forever.” The challenge, she said, is learning to present dense reporting in ways that draw people in, especially on platforms like Instagram.

Sanchez pressed the question of whether resources should follow viral potential or loyal readers. “Do you spend more resources on that story that more people are going to open, but fewer of your real customers?” he asked. “Do you ever think that way?” Seiler answered the broader issue by warning that newsrooms cannot stop aiming high. “The quickest way to lose trust or to erode trust is to stop playing for big stakes,” he said.

Metrics matter, but they cannot become the assignment editor

The panel also explored how closely editors watch audience data. Brendlen said she checks metrics “a couple times a day,” especially when updating the homepage, choosing newsletter leads or deciding “what do I need to Instagram today.” But she does not use poor performance as a cudgel. “If something is doing really well, yes,” she said, she tells reporters. If it is not, she added, “No. I mean, they have access to the same software. They can look if they want to.”

Sanchez said his newsroom watches the numbers more closely than he does. “My newsroom does, and they talk to me when something’s out of whack one way or the other, high or low,” he said. But he cautioned against reacting too quickly. “I don’t think it matters in an immediate way that you want to change things,” Sanchez said. “Otherwise, a newsroom is then just, I think, chasing stuff, and I don’t want to chase stuff.”

Seiler described a far more data-saturated reality inside a larger media company. “Now my performance, my team’s performance can be cut up and examined and anatomized in hundreds of different ways,” he said, citing newsletter open rates, click-through rates, daily performance, social performance, podcasts and reels. He said he checks Marfeel “more times a day than I would care to admit,” but emphasized that the numbers must lead back to journalism, not replace it. “You want to absorb it, and you want to learn from it, but ultimately, it just comes right back around to the fact that we want them to do good stories.”

AI is becoming a force multiplier, not a replacement

When the conversation turned to artificial intelligence, the panelists described a mix of caution, experimentation and practical use. Brendlen said, “I personally do not,” when asked if she uses AI in her newsroom, but noted that others at Brooklyn Paper and Schneps do. She quoted a coworker’s rule of thumb: “Use it for robots talking to robots.” In practice, she said, that can mean optimizing headlines for newsletter open rates, helping with search summaries or turning submitted events into print calendar listings.

At Hearst, Seiler said AI experimentation has become more deliberate. “They are being told to absolutely use AI responsibly, experiment robustly and responsibly,” he said of Hearst newsrooms. He described reporters and producers building tools to monitor school board meetings, summarize agendas and transcripts, and review lengthy appellate court decisions. That does not mean copying and pasting machine output into stories, he said, but using AI as “a great tool for surveying either the agenda or the transcript.”

Seiler rejected the idea that AI itself eliminated newsroom jobs. “Those three jobs have already been eliminated, thank you very much, by the changes to the economic model of journalism,” he said. AI, in his view, can help the journalists who remain. With one education reporter now doing work that once might have been divided among multiple beats, he said, “AI can be a force multiplier for her in allowing her to just cover her area, her topic area more broadly.”

Sanchez said his organization has not lost jobs to AI across “three newsrooms and 10 newspapers,” but is using it for efficiency. “Tell us what’s happening with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift this week in 100 words,” he said as one example of how AI can help fill national-interest space. But he also warned that it still requires verification. After one query about Mamdani’s first hundred days, Sanchez said the tool responded, “Mamdani is not the mayor of New York City.” His takeaway was clear: “We always have to check that stuff.”