Issue 11. Numbers

In the digital age, journalism often chases clicks and likes, and media organizations focus on maximizing “reach” (the number of online viewers). This essay argues that such strategies miss the point: people don’t only want information, they want to feel supported and heard. Propaganda often fills that gap, when news does not. Journalism’s true value lies in serving real people with real problems, not in chasing metrics or algorithms.

A newsroom executive in a local American media recently told me she couldn't make murders happen. It was a dry joke, but the lack of homicides was seriously affecting her ability to keep operating the only newsroom in her town. Social traffic had dried up unless something horrific spiked. AI summaries were eating her search traffic. The only time she felt real reach was when someone died violently. That's the news that worked. Everything else barely registered.

At Radio Free Europe, where I oversaw digital strategy across Ukrainian and other newsrooms during the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we measured reach obsessively, much like other big legacy media organizations. Reach figures have long been the evidence we were doing our job. What we weren't asking (what many still aren't asking) was a more basic question: Does any of this actually help anyone?

The reach problem has gotten structurally worse since then, and it already was bad. We're living through an avalanche of content. AI tools let anyone produce it at scale. Every institution, every government, every commercial or political actor with an agenda publishes constantly. Competing for attention through output alone is a losing position. And yet that's still the dominant instinct: publish more, publish better, optimize the headline, find the right platform for mass reach, chase its algorithm.

I've concluded after years of optimizing reach for small and large media organizations that the algorithm game is the wrong game for newsrooms. Not just because it's hard to win, but because winning it doesn't mean what newsrooms think it means. Reach measures how far your version of a story traveled. It doesn't tell you whether anyone used it, trusted it, remembered it, or whether it helped them. Platform and format are the wrong place to look for competitive advantage because anyone can use them.

Another point for soul-searching was my idealistic understanding of editorial independence. In many newsrooms I worked in, editorial independence is nothing but a rationale for publishing what editors found personally important rather than a discipline for meeting actual information needs. The two things are not the same. Pretending they are has cost journalism a great deal of its relevance and effectiveness.

Part of the reason those needs go unaddressed is structural. Media funding not rooted in demonstrable relevance to actual people is an investment in clientelism. The intentions may be good, often they are, but clientelism for the right side is still clientelism. It weakens whatever side it's on.

The American model of international media support, which collapsed so suddenly in 2025, had been running under this logic for years. Grants flowed toward organizations that could articulate the right abstract values: democracy, accountability, press freedom. Organizations didn't have to demonstrate that anyone's life was concretely better for the work. Both sides performed their roles in a strange symbiosis: funders received impact narratives and grantees received funding. The communities those organizations claimed to serve were mostly not in the room.

When U.S. support largely ended and European funders moved to fill the gap, many made the same assumptions, just with less money and more nostalgia for the influence of newspapers and broadcasters of the last millennium, however flawed they actually were. The result is a repeat of the same institutional capture with the same beneficiaries and smaller budgets. I see the same faces from Washington now in Brussels, using the same frameworks and dashboards to advance the same hollow definition of independence: the freedom to publish whatever editors find important rather than anything rooted in what people could actually need.

This matters beyond the funding question. A system that selects for the right narratives instead of demonstrating service doesn't just waste money. It leaves the actual needs gap open and that gap doesn't stay empty.

Russian and far-right information operations have been remarkably effective on Western platforms. The journalism world has spent enormous energy and money on how to counter them. Most answers have been technical or procedural: better fact-checking, platform regulation, media literacy campaigns. Some of that matters. But the more important question has been underasked: why they land.

Of course, they land partly because they exploit algorithms rooted in incentivizing hatred and division. There is an implicit alliance between Moscow and Meta that historians will eventually examine carefully. But people have agency, they aren’t passive consumers of information. Rage-baiting and lies address real psychological and social needs that legitimate institutions have failed to meet, like needs for belonging, for recognition and for explanations that make sense of a world that feels rigged. There is a valid need for someone to take your situation seriously.

The content is often transparently false, but the emotional register it operates in is real. The grievance being tapped is also real. The feeling of being ignored by institutions that claim to serve you is real, and it predates any Kremlin or Republican strategy document.

Demagogues and propagandists understood something mainstream journalism has largely missed: people don't primarily seek objective information. They seek orientation, recognition, and community. They want to feel that someone is on their side. Meet those needs badly and dishonestly, and you get misinformation that spreads. Ignore them entirely, frame yourself as the objective journalist writing about things you believe people should think about, and you get journalism that reaches no one.

This is what reach numbers miss. An information operation doesn't succeed because it has large numbers. Numbers follow from finding a place where people feel unheard and underserved and moving into it. If journalism wants to understand what it should be doing, the resonance of bad-faith information is a useful map. It points to where honest, useful information service is absent or failing.

What journalism can do that propaganda cannot is be genuinely useful to specific people over time in understanding our shared lived experiences. That’s not to say it will be useful in the abstract, public-service, democratic-value sense that looks good in a grant application but useful in ways that help someone figure out what to do next, that makes someone feel heard and cared for. This kind of utility cannot be faked at scale and cannot be automated. AI slop stands no chance. It has to be built through real relationships with real people and earned repeatedly.

A librarian I met at a conference last year in New York stopped me short when I was making a similar argument. She said, "You're talking about what librarians do." She was right. People have been doing this work without calling it journalism. They will keep doing it. The question is whether those of us who do call it journalism are actually doing it in service of anyone, and are putting their skills to use with sufficient intent.

Accepting this meant giving up part of my understanding of my own value and role. In large media institutions, status attaches to certain kinds of work: the prize-winning investigation (done), the prestigious newsroom or beat (done), the viral post that gets reshared widely (done). But then what? When you start asking whether you're helping specific people with specific problems, you're measuring something much harder to put into a funding application. The comfort of big reach numbers disappears, leaving something more difficult and more real.

I don't know whether this rethinking will happen first in Ukraine or somewhere else. But the conditions for it are more present among journalists and practitioners in Ukraine than in the comfortable institutions currently funding their own irrelevance in Brussels and beyond.

The temptation will be to chase the same funding models, to perform the same abstractions about democracy and press freedom for foreign funders. That world is highly replicable. Its narratives are cheap. But journalists and practitioners in Ukraine have had to reckon directly with what it means when someone in a position of power spreads lies. To have information weaponized against you. To survive on what's actually true and useful. That clarity is not academic. It's existential. And it's exactly what the rest of us lack.

That's where I look for answers. I no longer look at institutions with a primary focus on perpetuating their own existence. I don’t think impact frameworks developed in Washington or Brussels by people who've never had to stake anything real on whether their work was true or useful. Answers will come from people who've had no choice but to figure out what honest, useful information service actually looks like.

I want to live in a world where journalism earns its place not through proximity to power or the performance of democratic values for foreign funders, but by being genuinely useful to people living through difficult circumstances, and helping them navigate those circumstances. I believe that status that comes from utility to people rather than closeness to power is a more resilient foundation than anything the current model offers. It's also harder to co-opt. You can't capture a service accountable to specific people with specific needs the way you can capture one accountable to performative declarations, abstract principles and the funders who invoke them.

The disruption is brutal, confusing and sometimes painful, but no amount of nostalgia makes the reality go away. The craft of journalism has always been about understanding how our lived experience is changing. The industry for too long found ways to avoid that question when looking at itself. Perhaps that changes now, and we'll likely learn how from the people who had the least room to look away.

Illustration: Victoria Boyko