“We need to rethink what news is” – Our Digital News Report global launch panel on building audience relationships

A summary of an event featuring Simon Robinson from Reuters, Emily Kent Smith from Goalhanger and Kamal Ahmed from Fortune. How can news organisations best understand, relate to and serve audiences in a changing news environment? In light of the findings of the Digital News Report 2026 , three prominent media managers explored this question and more in a panel discussion at our London launch event. Over 100 editors, researchers and media executives attended the event, which took place in London on Tuesday 16 June at Reuters’ headquarters. It featured a presentation by lead author Jim Egan and a panel moderated by the Institute's director, Mitali Mukherjee , featuring Simon Robinson , executive editor of Reuters, Emily Kent Smith , editorial director of podcast network Goalhanger, and Kamal Ahmed , executive editorial director for the UK and Europe at Fortune . Watch the launch .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } 1. Catering to different audiences A central theme of the report this year is the growing “platformisation” of news consumption. For the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as news sources. The significance of this shift is underscored by the diminishing influence of institutional journalism and the rise of a fragmented alternative media environment that includes news influencers and personalities. While these trends are increasingly pronounced on a global level, they are moving more slowly in places where news brands still maintain strong audience connections. Against this backdrop of a fractured news ecosystem, a recurring theme of the panel was how to maintain and strengthen those audience relationships. Part of the answer lies in strategies that recognise audience fragmentation and accept that not all audiences want the same news proposition. Goalhanger has been highly successful at understanding its varied audience through a portfolio of “The Rest Is…” offerings covering entertainment, politics, history, and more. Kent Smith suggested that one reason for Goalhanger’s success is that its offerings are off-beat, audience-specific, and not widely served elsewhere. “Someone listening to hours of The Rest is History is an incredibly informed person, but they're perhaps not a news junkie,” she said. “All of our shows are almost individual mini-businesses and empires, so The Rest is History is a very different business to The Rest is Science, to, for example, The Rest is Entertainment, and they have extremely different audiences.” Fortune , by contrast, is built around a very specific niche audience: one motivated by business success and by staying ahead of the curve, Ahmed said. Strategically, that means rejecting mass-volume, breaking-news coverage and instead optimizing the specialist touchpoints that their business-minded audience values. “We have a really clear proposition to our audience, and then what we call full service provision,” said Ahmed. “Earned media is only part of what we do, so that's the material you see on Fortune.com and in the magazine, but we also do partnerships, events, and very importantly, newsletters, which we see as a way of giving people in communities specific material that is for them.” For Reuters, the challenge of differentiation stems from the fact that it is a global, generalist brand, Robinson said. But the organisation is now beginning to think in terms of multiple audiences and communities rather than a single monolithic public. The strategic shift is from serving “everyone” to identifying and serving many distinct smaller publics, while preserving standards and trust. “The mass audience offerings are harder to do because you can get anything that you want and a much deeper version of it online now… Read more