Dmitry Shishkin, a veteran of the BBC and former CEO of Ringier International, has a back-to-basics suggestion: Journalism needs to adapt more of a product mindset. Too much of what newsrooms produce is basic news updates rather than acting as a utility for the audience. His User Needs framework seeks to shift journalism to be more useful to the audience. We talk about why newsrooms overproduce content nobody values, how the BBC tripled its audience by doing less, why Dmitry thinks the next editor-in-chief should come from audience development, what happens when AI can handle all the commodity news, and whether your publication would even be missed if it disappeared tomorrow.
