Double interview: ‘When we talk about the news at the water cooler, we should still be talking about the same thing’

What must journalism do to maintain—or even regain—its relevance and influence with the public? NU.nl Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Mossink and Fabienne Meijer, Head of Journalistic Products at OCCRP, will discuss this topic. “Transforming the ‘broadcasting’ mindset is the biggest challenge facing journalism.”

Text: Lisa Peters

“I’ve long been concerned that there’s no longer such a thing as a shared reality. I feel a great sense of responsibility for this, especially with a publication that has such a wide reach,” says NU.nl’s editor-in-chief, Lindsay Mossink, in her office at the DPG Media building Mediavaert, overlooking the Amsterdam Arena. “It’s so important that the people who are visiting us now keep coming back and don’t stop. Because the internet isn’t getting any better.”

Sitting across from her is Fabienne Meijer, head of journalistic products at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a media outlet that couldn’t be further from NU.nl in terms of article length—“they’re dense, 10,000-word pieces at the PhD level.” Meijer recently started writing the newsletter *De Durfredactie*, which focuses on product thinking in journalism—in other words, carefully considering what people really need.

How do your organizations—as different as they may be—try to reach the public? And what challenges do you face?

Fabienne Meijer: “At OCCRP, we produce excellent, critical investigative journalism that nobody reads. It’s quite paradoxical that our founder often says, ‘We’re here for the public.’” As far as I’m concerned, those two things don’t go together, and I often explain this using the metaphor of a specialty cheese shop: we sell really good cheese, and people who love cheese know where to find us. But if we want to be there for everyone, we have to realize that not everyone likes cheese or eats it every day. Then you have to broaden your selection—to include vegan cheese, crackers, and wine, for example.’

Lindsay Mossink: “Or make the cheese cheaper.”

Meijer: “We journalists consider our profession to be incredibly noble and intrinsically important, even if no one reads it. But a cheese shop that no one visits isn’t valuable either. We don’t write stories into a vacuum; we want to make an impact. And yet, it’s hard to keep that perspective in mind amid the daily pressure of deadlines.”

Just to stick with this analogy for a moment, what kind of store do you run, Lindsay?

Mossink: “A supermarket where you can get everything. The strength of NU.nl is that we’re so incredibly close to our audience and are there for everyone. Still, I recognize the tendency you describe, Fabienne—namely, a tendency among some journalists to think, “We’ll just tell people how it is.” I sometimes notice that attitude among us as well, even though we have a large comment section and start each day by asking: What did our visitors ask, talk about, and debate yesterday? Shifting away from that “broadcasting” mindset is the biggest challenge facing journalism.”

How, then, should journalists conduct themselves?

Mossink: “Humble.”

Meijer: “Journalists can be quite arrogant.”

Mossink: “It’s not about the journalist, the brand, or this newsroom—it’s about the audience. That can be contradictory. In recent years, NU.nl was pretty anonymous. Readers couldn’t name a single person who worked for us. We’re working on giving our reporters a bit more of a public face, so that people know: I need to go to Matthijs le Loux if I want to understand what on earth the difference is between Putin’s and Trump’s tactics. That helps build egos, which also serve a purpose. But you do want them to maintain a humble attitude toward the public.”

Meijer: “It reminds me of an essay by Julia Angwin in which she wonders why people do trust content creators on social media, but not media organizations. According to her, the media have an air of ‘you have to trust us because we’ve been doing this for ages’ and don’t make any extra effort to show why they’re trustworthy. Those creators start from scratch: nobody knows them—they’re constantly explaining who they are and why they’re trustworthy. And they respond to comments—something most news organizations still don’t do.’

Mossink: “I can relate to that! Our best reporters are the ones who engage with readers in the comments section of their articles. That builds trust, answers questions from the public, and helps us better understand their needs.”

Meijer: “And, not unimportantly, you create a community—people feel heard and seen. Actually, reaching your audience is so simple: just keep the conversation going.”

NU.nl celebrated its 25th anniversary last year and invited readers to its newsroom for the first time. What insights did that provide?

Mossink: “Millions of people visit NU.nl every day, but who exactly are they? We had no idea. Until we suddenly found ourselves standing in front of a room full of NU.nl visitors. It was an incredibly diverse group, each and every one of them engaged with our work and feeling that NU.nl belongs to them, in a way. Our reporters found it quite exciting to suddenly be talking not to anonymous readers, but to real people. That made an impression. The realization grew: we really have to do our best for you.”

Paywall or no paywall?

Mossink: “There will be no paywall on NU.nl under my leadership.”

Meijer: “We don’t have one at OCCRP either. We mainly get funding from donors and a few wealthy individuals. Many publishers think people only pay for access. But there’s plenty of content available on the web, and let’s face it, news outlets aren’t Netflix—our content isn’t that special. People pay for a community and for their own identity; they feel like an NRC or AD reader.”

Mossink: “We handed out NU.nl sweaters at that open house, and everyone wanted one. I hadn’t expected that. With that community, NU.nl really has a big head start.”

Fabienne, you participated in our Three-Day Journalism Workshop, and after that you launched your newsletter, *De Durfredactie*. In one of those issues, you discuss what inspires trust. What stands out in that piece?

Meijer: “There’s always so much emphasis on greater transparency to build trust. For my newsletter, I dug into this and discovered that people are willing to pay for journalism that’s personally relevant to them. Trust is linked to whether people consider a media outlet competent, but it’s also about integrity: Do I believe you have my best interests at heart? And: Do we share the same values and standards? Journalism still has a lot of work to do, especially on those last two issues. “Transparency is not a panacea for trust.”

Do you see news personalization as a way to better address personal relevance?

Meijer: “I’m not in favor of pigeonholing people based on AI and then giving everyone their own personalized feed. Personalization starts with empathy: what do you need? And of course, every now and then you also need to be challenged to read something you didn’t ask for. If a reader trusts a media outlet, they’ll be willing to go along with that.”

Mossink: “We’ve recently started using an algorithm to personalize a small portion of the main news section on our front page.”

What is the reaction to this?

Mossink: “It can be a struggle at times. It’s not what the editorial staff wants—a black box over which they have no control. They’re afraid people will miss important news. I’ve been transparent about this with our readers in my editor-in-chief’s blog, and of the 200 comments, a very large portion was negative. “I’ll end up in a bubble” and “I want to be in control myself,” visitors wrote.

One question has stuck with me. A reader pointed out that if she checks the news on NU.nl and then talks about it with a colleague by the coffee machine, surely they must be talking about the same thing? Because isn’t that our job? And that’s exactly right. “We want people to talk about the facts we report and then form an opinion about them.”

Is she afraid of losing the shared reality?

Mossink: “I understand that fear. That’s why the top eight posts—and thus the most important news—are the same for everyone. The bottom five vary from person to person. This sounds really simplistic, but it works like a charm, and it does serve our users well. The question now is how we can also include articles that people wouldn’t naturally click on, but that are still relevant, in the mix.”

Meijer: “It reminds me of the Danish media analyst Thomas Baekdal, who used ChatGPT to create a daily, personalized front page. And what did we find? Gas prices in Denmark were often featured, because that was relevant to him, while all the media organizations mainly had Trump on their front pages. That’s quite an interesting thought experiment: AI as a tool to reveal relevance. It’s not just about what you’ve clicked on before, but also about: what can you actually do with it?”

Fabienne, during the Three-Day Event, you paraphrased your former Stanford professor, who said, “Journalism is a market failure.” Why did that stick with you so much?

Meijer: “Because it made me realize that the market will never pay enough for journalism, even though it provides so much value to society. Journalism is a public good, just like a highway or a streetlight: it’s important that it exists, and no one has exclusive use of it. Furthermore, good journalism provides society with more value than the producer receives in return. We cannot avoid the fact that parties outside the market—such as the government or foundations—are necessary.”

Mossink: “May I add something to that? My colleague Tim had discovered that Russian propaganda was being shown on the BabyTV channel. It was subsequently removed from the channel, which has made society a little better. But do we pay Tim for that? No. We pay him—even though we have a big, thick wall separating the editorial department from the sales department—with an ad from Albert Heijn. That’s another way to do it.”

Photo on the left: Fabienne Meijer (credit: Joyce van Doorn)

Photo on the right: Lindsay Mossink (credit: Lidian van Megen)