This is the third in a short series on how to shift from merely covering your community to building for it.
In Part 1 we examined the service trap — that state of constant output and inevitable burnout. In Part 2, we considered how to start thinking like a product-driven newsroom by practicing user listening, dot-connecting and learning by small experiments. In this last installment, let’s get practical. You don’t need a product team or a new budget line to get started. You need one mindset shift, one outcome metric and one protected hour per week to make it happen.
Value over volume
The biggest obstacle in most newsrooms isn’t funding, it’s oxygen. We’re all sprinting. Bandwidth is dictated by deadlines. The last thing we can see ourselves adding is…something new.
Product thinking isn’t another to-do on your list. It’s a chance to regain focus, cut through the noise and remember why we’re doing this work in the first place.
I still cringe when I think back to when most newsrooms were driven by the pageview or unique visitor metrics. Our industry default was to chase the click by building another photo gallery or writing a clickbait headline — whatever it took to show one more “visitor” on the analytics dashboard, even if they were worlds away from our actual readers.
Product thinking, on the other hand, doesn’t ask us to do more. It helps us focus on what matters most: value, not volume.
What was the value in a 100-photo gallery of the Naked Bike Ride? (Yes, that is an actual event!) Or breaking up an article over five pages just to get more clicks? What was the benefit of courting a national audience on a local news site plastered with ads for plumbing services and pizza joints they’ll never use?
So stop asking, “How many stories did we publish?” Ask yourself instead, “Did our reporting help one person do or change something — vote, volunteer, show up or understand?”
The one-hour challenge
If you can dedicate one hour per week to product thinking, you can change your news organization’s trajectory.
What if you could use that one hour per week to do one thing to move the needle on those values? What if you could use it to…
- Talk to one reader
- Sketch a system around one story
- Review one outcome metric and ask if it really maps to impact
When I was managing teams, I used to filter everything through a very simple question: would this be the first, best or only version of this work that exists? If the answer was no, that work probably wasn’t worth our precious time. The question helped us cut through clutter and turn weekly planning from a checklist into a strategy meeting.
If someone else was already doing something better than we could, we let it go. If we could do it best, we doubled down. If it was something only we could do, something that could only be built from a deep knowledge of our community and the trust we had established, we made it a priority.
That’s the real value of an hour like this. It’s not about more meetings, it’s about intention.
The smartest colleagues I’ve had describe it as seeking the white space — finding the gaps where no one is serving your audience. Spend that hour in the white space. That’s where the real opportunity lies.
Over time, that one hour every week builds muscle memory: the intuition to pause, assess and iterate instead of react. When you give yourself space to slow down, you make better, faster decisions later. That’s the paradox of product thinking: you slow down one hour per week to move more intelligently every other day.
Product thinking makes your journalism more efficient, more impactful and more sustainable. This is how the smallest newsrooms can have the biggest impact: they stop measuring output and start measuring outcomes. They stop chasing the urgent and start building for what lasts.
One hour. One metric. One mindset shift. That’s all it takes to start.
Try it this week
Block one hour. Choose one story. Define one outcome. Ask yourself first, best or only. Ship something small.
I’d love to see what you try. Reply to this newsletter or email me at yoni.greenbaum@pressinstitute.org with a sentence or two on what you tried, what you learned and what you will do differently next time. If you build something small from it, include a link or screenshot. With your permission, I will feature a few anonymized examples in a future API newsletter, so others can learn from your work.
