Using journalism tools to save the news industry

Updated January 2026:

“Here’s the bad news: No one is coming to save you. No business is going to swoop in and provide sustainable funding for newsrooms. No new technology is going to transform the way journalism supports itself forever.

“No big, incredible deal is going to build a strong foundation for the news. There isn’t a single magic bullet that will work for everyone. Even producing groundbreaking journalism isn’t going to suddenly turn your fortunes around.”

Source: Use the tools of journalism to save it » Nieman Journalism Lab

Ben Werdmuller has a sobering and realistic take on today’s journalism. It looks grim for journalism, yet there is optimism of sorts here.

The news industry made strategic missteps in adapting to digital, but journalists themselves have the skills to navigate this transformation.

A conversation

He says journalists need to recognise the internet is not a broadcast medium but a conversation. This is true.

Many journalists use social media as a broadcast medium. They see it as a way to draw in readers to their newspaper, radio or TV channel websites. Whether they post to X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Linkedin or one of the newer alternatives like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon, they often simply post a link to their stories hosted on mainstream media sites. In many cases that's the end of their interactions.

This can be just as true in 2026 as it was five or more years ago.

Yet many New Zealand journalists have learned how to engage with readers online.

This is especially true of the journalists who have pushed out of traditional media boundaries and are no longer employed by major news brands. They may produce podcasts or YouTube video. They may publish on Substack or similar services. They may run email delivered newsletters or more traditional websites.

In the earlier 2020 story I wrote about Twitter, it could apply to any modern social media channel:

“Most use it as a broadcast medium – like an RSS feed. A number have Twitter accounts, but say little of value. Perhaps 40 percent can be said to be serious Twitter journalists.”

Change Twitter to X or any other social media channel and you'll realise the number hasn’t changed much. Less than half of the journalists visible online use social media to its full advantage.

Social media as a conversation

What has changed is many of New Zealand’s higher profile journalists now have regular active social media conversations. Go and dig around, you’ll see many of the best-known names engaging with their audiences. It can be hard doing this among the snark and antagonism.

One innovation that I previously attempted on my site was to integrate social comments. At the time my site was hosted on WordPress. Back then I used a couple of IndieWeb tools to capture tweets or other responses to my posts on stories. I’ve did this to boost the conversational aspect of my work.

Now I have switched the site to Ghost, specially Ghost Pro because it includes the ability to create and send email newsletters. Ghost does not allow the kind of plug-ins that can be used to expand WordPress functionality.

A potential conversational superpower

Instead, it has its own superpower. Ghost publishes to something called the Fediverse.

Thanks to the Fediverse, you don’t need to be “on” a social network in order to interact with people using suitable services such as Mastodon or BlueSky.

When you publish a post on a Ghost site, it can be sent out automatically so people on Mastodon and other fediverse platforms can follow it, see it in their feeds and reply to it.

What this means from the reader’s point of view is that:

• They can follow your site like they would follow a person
• Your posts automatically appear in their timeline
• Any replies they make to these Fediverse posts automatically come back to your site.

This means journalists don't need to broadcast on social media. They can run their websites and newsletters. They don't actually post to Mastodon or BlueSky. The beauty of this approach is that you are not limited to one social media service. Nor are you even limited to social media... material distributed to the Fediverse can turn up in other ways.

To date my experience using this tools has meant limited interaction. I still get more feedback via email than by the Fediverse. And I still remain active on BlueSky, Mastodon and Linkedin. There are frequent conversations, but they don't yet all appear under the single Fediverse umbrella.

Building audience relationships

Ben Werdmuller's story linked to at the top of this post from ends with:

“Until publishers encourage reporters and editors to engage with their audiences, they are going to miss out on the potential of Twitter.

Of course, the journalists who do this best will become media brands in their own right, which will worry the bean counters. But that’s another story…”

This continues to be true many years after those words were written even if Twitter has morphed into the dysfunctional X and other services have replace it..

Many of us who still work as journalists are now mini-brands. Publishers and editors hire journalists with a good brand. Freelancers like me get work on the back of having a brand.

This doesn’t come naturally to older journalists. We taught journalists to keep themselves out of the story. I'm still not 100 percent comfortable inserting myself into stories.

But that’s not how things work today and it definitely isn’t how blogging works.

Yet many of the old-school journalism fundamentals remain valuable - it's about adapting them, not abandoning them.

Community

Werdmuller has a different take on what amounts to the same idea. He writes:

“Instead of thinking in terms of having an audience, you need to think about building and serving a community. Instead of informing, you need to be listening. The opportunities to learn the nuances of your community and to serve it directly are unprecedented — but it takes work.”

It does take work. One of the skills journalists pick up is to be excellent at listening to sources. In the past we’ve not been so good at listening to our audiences. It took me a while, although judging by my earlier posts, I was onto this many years ago.

Some of the institutional knowledge that helped us understand audiences, like newspaper librarians who provided context and memory, has been lost along the way. But journalists can rebuild that connection directly.

The point here is there hasn’t been a clear dividing line between sources and audiences for many years now. Likewise, there is less of a division between journalists and audiences. We are, as Werdmuller puts it, communities. He is right when he says this takes work, but boy, it can be rewarding.

Building these direct relationships with communities also helps solve the business model challenge. When readers understand the value journalists provide, they're more willing to support the work - though how we frame that support matters tremendously. Publishers struggled with this transition, but individual journalists and small outlets have found ways to make it work.

More on journalism and media:

This post is part of ongoing coverage about journalism business models, digital adaptation and modern reporting:

• Apple’s iPad won’t save newspapers.
• Lack of local technology news damages industry.
• Dealing with the pay wall economy.
• Journalists too mean to tech companies.
• New Zealand tech journalism: the twilight years.