Lenfest Institute: Start with service: A practical reset for media impact

When we began our careers in journalism years ago, the industry operated like a priesthood. Our work felt like a calling. It came with longstanding self-proclaimed authorities: we decide what’s important, we tell the stories we think matter, and in turn, we expect gratitude in the form of attention for our actions and messages. 

That model is dead. Democratic decay and the digital revolution buried it, and no philanthropic funding can resurrect it. But now what? How do we evolve the social utility of the craft of journalism? 

At the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit, we spoke to a room full of journalists, newsroom executives, funders, and journalism support professionals about why journalism struggles to articulate its value and how a service framework can guide us through systemic disruption.

The structural challenge

Journalism faces three converging threats: political, technological, and financial. Fighting them is requiring us both to adapt how we do our work and how we communicate why it’s still important. But we haven’t found alignment on either front. We still produce content like tech companies chasing engagement, and have adopted social sector impact metrics in attempts to prove our methods still work.

This mismatch leaves us with puzzle pieces but no coherent picture of our actual value. Even as storytellers, we are bad at using evidence to tell our own story.

The problem is bigger than measurement. Cynical actors have captured our institutions and distribution platforms. Our institutional status has become a liability, and our de facto power as information gatekeepers is lost. We now operate on the same playing field as everyone else, and refusing to evolve makes us look like we’re stuck in our own pity party.

The pen doesn’t become mightier than the sword through direct confrontation – that’s a battle journalism repeatedly loses. Our power will emerge once we stop trying to duel with swords and expecting to be grandfathered into relevance, and instead focus on what we can do best: compete on utility in a marketplace of time and attention.

But we’ve been trying to take a shortcut to success by jumping straight from journalism to societal change. We publish investigations with the expectation that the next result will be a flourishing democracy. We cover healthcare and sit back expecting systems to immediately improve. This magical thinking sets everyone up for disappointment. 

The missing middle: Service

We’re not going to help anyone or absolve our industry’s challenges by oversimplifying how change occurs. Real change doesn’t happen because we tell people what to care about. It happens when we give them tools to act on what they already care about. This requires adding an essential middle step: service.

Journalism has long been using the term to describe certain editorial initiatives, especially consumer-oriented advice. We believe that a broader framing of service can unlock the current crisis of relevance that journalism faces. 

Service means helping people navigate their lives better with information. A parent who understands school performance data can advocate for their child. A worker who knows their rights can negotiate better conditions. A community that tracks how tax dollars are spent can demand accountability.

This shift from abstract impact to concrete service doesn’t diminish journalism’s power – it channels it more effectively. We’ve already begun to see examples. Look at how newsrooms across the United States are helping residents get tax foreclosure money back, find out why their statewide teaching stipends didn’t come through, enroll their children in local education systems, or learn how their neighbors work and play in their city.

This isn’t about abandoning watchdog journalism. It’s about ensuring that work actually reaches and helps the people who need it.

Resetting expectations

Embracing this middle step requires that our methods that precede and come after it shift. It changes the questions that we ask ourselves about where we begin to create this type of journalism, and how we measure what comes from it. It ultimately requires us to get serious about having more than a two-step theory of change. 

During our session, participants joined us in grappling with this shift and its opportunities. One wondered how to get buy-in from staff who “think they just need to write good investigative stories they want to write then the people will support us.” Others asked: “What questions should we be asking to define our impact or to capture it?” and “Should change be the goal, or is providing informed choice the goal?”

These questions reflect deeper uncertainties about journalism’s role in a moment when our traditional assumptions no longer hold. They also point to the challenge of moving from grand ambitions to human-scale outcomes, and an opportunity where our traditional accountability and investigative roles can be a foundation.

We cannot promise to reduce gun violence with a series of articles, but we can interrogate local exacerbations of the problem, connect families to trauma counseling services and compile safety resources for schools, and guide them to causes they can support to reduce it. We cannot vow to fix education systems, but we can profile candidates for school board elections, help parents navigate school choice options and find tutoring programs that fit their budget, and give them examples of other ways education funds could be used.

Do funders support the service model? The honest answer is: not yet, not fully. But when we pitch actionable utility rather than news for news’ sake and can demonstrate what comes from it, it becomes an easier ask for everyone to get behind, and a concept that hubris-fatigued funders can probably embrace. 

As one participant noted, journalism needs to measure “system change and/or behavior change of individual audience members.” But that starts with providing genuine utility, not publishing content and hoping for transformation.

Unlocking real measurement

This shift from abstract impact to concrete service removes the hubris but demands more complexity. We stop pretending that publishing alone can save democracy and we start asserting forcefully that informed people can build democracy. To get there, we start by asking whether we actually helped someone make a better healthcare decision or understand their child’s education options. 

The formula we proposed reflects this: 

(journalism/relevance)^time = Δpublic good

Journalism provides information gathering and sharing. Relevance ensures that what we produce is significant to people’s current realities and lived experiences. Time allows for access and reflection to use it. Together, they create measurable change in a slightly better informed society. When a parent uses our school reporting to advocate for their child, that’s the formula in action.

Session participants shared existing measurement challenges during the session: unclear definitions of impact, too many types of data, no ownership of the process. But they also saw opportunities. Attendees noted that effective measurement means tracking both who is being served and what interests are being served alongside actual behavior change. To do that, we shared frameworks for how organizations can move from reach-based to value-based measurement. 

Practical frameworks

These frameworks provide newsrooms with strategic direction to identify points of utility rather than only engagement in their measurement approaches.

• Jobs to Be Done helps define your service value proposition clearly. Instead of “we cover healthcare,” try: “Our health newsletter helps parents who want to stay informed about healthcare options by reporting on changing treatments and coverage, reducing uncertainty and increasing confidence in making informed choices.”
• The AARRR Funnel identifies weak spots in your audience strategy by tracking how people move from discovery through referral. Where are you losing them? What barriers can you remove? How do these trends show opportunities where you can provide more value?
• The Media Funnel is a simplified version of this, tracking the user’s journey from reach through loyalty and revealing growth opportunities at each stage. 
• The Product Strategy-Metrics Sandwich aligns your North Star metric (which reflects the persistent value you deliver) with your strategic choices and progress indicators.
  

Moving forward

We can abandon our lecterns and preachings of an old world (that may have never really existed) and keep our ambitions of improving our political systems and reducing their many forms of oppression and roadblocks to greater opportunity. But we need to reposition our targets of change: a thousand informed decisions by empowered citizens will do more for democracy than any single Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé ever can. We all know that, and it’s time to put systems and new measurements in place that encourage that.

The energy in the room at the summit showed we’re not alone in wrestling with how to start doing this. Many attendees approached us afterward, eager to move beyond theory to practice. They shared struggles everyone in this industry is familiar with: newsrooms caught between grant requirements and community needs, reporters frustrated by metrics that don’t capture their impact, funders searching for better ways to evaluate success.

This isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about building something better together. The goal is providing people with utility that enables agency to make change. That’s journalism focused on genuine service. It’s more sustainable, more measurable, and ultimately more fulfilling than our old priestly pretensions.

We’re committed to continuing these conversations. Because journalism that helps people navigate their lives better isn’t just more likely to survive, it’s more likely to matter. 

Getting started

For those ready to move beyond theory to practice:

Download our session worksheet with inspiration on how to:

• Define your newsroom’s Jobs to Be Done
• Map your audience journey using the AARRR Funnel
• Identify your North Star metric
• Create your first service-based pilot project

Register for the follow-up conversations: 

We’ll be hosting calls to work through implementation challenges together and explore more on what a theory of service can do for journalism. 

Our first workshop will take place Thursday, Aug. 21 at 2 p.m. EDT / 11 a.m. PDT. Join us for a session for audience practitioners interested in implementing service methods in their newsrooms to provide audiences with valuable information that helps them navigate their lives. We’ll collectively discuss how to move past abstract notions of impact, identify current roadblocks in our practices, and determine starting points for implementing elements of a service-oriented framework. Lessons from this workshop will be shared in the following September session, with details TBA.