How Much of Your Journalism Goes Unseen?

Whenever we pitch Froomle to a publisher, we usually start with two simple questions.

• How many articles do you publish each day?
• How many articles does the average reader consume during a typical session?

The answers are almost always revealing.

A modern newsroom may publish a hundred or even several hundred articles every day, while the average reader only consumes a handful. That immediately raises a much more interesting question.

How much of your journalism does the average reader never even have the opportunity to discover?

At first, the answer seems obvious. No reader can consume everything a newsroom publishes. But the implication is much bigger than it first appears. If readers only encounter a tiny fraction of your journalism, how many articles that they would genuinely appreciate never even cross their path?

Every Article Has Its Audience

It is tempting to think that articles with relatively few readers are simply less interesting. In reality, that is rarely true.

Every article is written for someone. Some stories naturally appeal to a broad audience, while others are relevant to a much smaller group of readers. A local council decision, an in-depth scientific analysis, a niche sports competition or an interview with a local artist may never become the most-read story of the day. Yet for the readers who care about those subjects, these articles can be among the most valuable pieces of journalism the newsroom produces.

This also helps explain the enduring success of regional and local news. Readers are often willing to pay for journalism that is personally relevant to them: stories about their town, their neighbourhood, their local sports club or the topics they care about most. These articles may attract a relatively small audience compared to national headlines, but for that audience they are often indispensable.

In fact, this breadth of coverage is one of the reasons readers choose a particular publication. They trust it to cover not only the biggest stories everyone is talking about, but also the stories that matter specifically to them.

There is also a business dimension to this challenge. Every article represents an investment of time, expertise and editorial resources. Newsrooms therefore continuously balance the cost of producing more journalism against the value it creates. When many articles never reach the readers who would genuinely appreciate them, it becomes increasingly difficult to realise the full return on that investment.

The challenge, therefore, is not whether these articles have an audience.

The challenge is whether that audience ever discovers them.

If readers never encounter an article they would genuinely appreciate, its quality becomes almost irrelevant.

This is not a journalism problem. It is a discovery problem.

Two Sides of the Same Challenge

We often describe personalisation as helping readers discover relevant articles. While that is certainly true, it only tells half of the story.

Publishers invest enormous amounts of time, talent and resources into producing journalism. They want every story they publish to reach the audience that will value it most. Readers, meanwhile, want to discover the journalism that is most relevant to their interests, their location and the moment they are in.

In other words, publishers are trying to find readers, and readers are trying to find journalism.

Without effective discovery, both sides struggle.

Editors Cannot Build Millions of Newspapers

Readers don't simply visit a news website to browse headlines. They rely on editors to tell them what matters. They expect journalists to investigate important stories, verify facts and make difficult editorial choices. Editorial judgement is, and will always remain, irreplaceable.

But editors also face an impossible task.

Every page is necessarily a compromise. It has room for only a limited number of stories, yet it serves readers with vastly different interests. No single homepage can simultaneously be the perfect newspaper for a politics enthusiast, a football supporter, a science reader, a young parent and someone interested in financial markets.

As newsrooms publish more articles, that challenge only becomes greater.

The limitation is not editorial judgement. It is scale. No editor can manually curate a unique newspaper for every individual reader.

This Is Where Personalisation Matters

This is where personalisation has its greatest impact.

It does not replace editorial curation. It builds upon it.

Editors decide which stories deserve to be published and which events every citizen should know about. Personalisation starts after that work has been done. Its role is to help every published article find the readers who are most likely to value it, while helping every reader discover journalism they might otherwise never have known existed.

Seen that way, personalisation is not primarily a technology for increasing clicks or engagement. Those are valuable outcomes, but they are consequences rather than the objective.

Its real purpose is much simpler.

It helps journalism find its audience.

By helping every reader discover more of the journalism they value, personalisation also helps publishers realise more of the value that already exists in the journalism they produce.

Measuring Success Differently

Perhaps publishers should ask a different question. Instead of asking: How many people clicked this article?

We might also ask: How many readers who would genuinely have appreciated this article ever had the opportunity to discover it?

That may be one of the most important questions in digital publishing.

The mission of modern publishing is no longer just creating great journalism. It is ensuring that every piece of journalism finds the audience that values it most.

Because great journalism only creates value after it has been discovered.