Want loyalty? Investing in hard-to-reach audiences will be the key

For more than a decade, the news industry has chased scale: bigger audiences, more pageviews, broader appeal. We’ve often heard: focus on the journalism first, and the audience will follow. I’ve never believed that, and in 2026, I think the industry will finally be forced to reckon with how wrong that assumption is.

The future of news will belong to organizations that make deliberate choices about who they serve, even when those audiences are harder to reach, more expensive to engage, and less attractive to traditional business models. Loyalty won’t come from chasing the biggest possible readership. It will come from sustained investment in communities that have long been overlooked.

The 2024 and 2025 election cycles made this painfully clear. Immigrant communities once again proved they are crucial civic actors and voting blocs — and yet they remain among the least served by mainstream newsrooms. Language barriers, platform fragmentation, and deep mistrust rooted in real harm have left millions of people without reliable, relevant local news. This isn’t just a failure of representation. It’s a failure of imagination.

At Documented, the nonprofit newsroom I oversee serving immigrant communities in New York City, we’ve built our journalism around the simple idea that audience comes first — not as a growth hack, but as a responsibility. Our reporting lives where our audience already is: on WeChat, WhatsApp, and Nextdoor. These aren’t just distribution channels for us; they’re a forum for building two-way relationships.

In 2024, we exchanged roughly 29,000 messages with our audience. We hosted two dozen events across the city with partner organizations. People asked questions about work permits, asylum cases, labor rights, and rumors of ICE activity. They shared tips that turned into investigations. They alerted us to misinformation in real time so that we could help stop it from spreading further. In response, we published original reporting alongside hundreds of actionable resource guides in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Haitian Creole — journalism designed not just to inform, but to be used. Trust was built message by message, often outside anything recognizable as “traffic.”

This work is slow. It’s labor-intensive. It doesn’t scale easily. And that’s exactly why it builds trust.

In 2026, more newsrooms will come to understand that loyalty is earned through presence, not just publication. Through answering questions. Through showing up consistently. Through being useful in moments when people actually need you. Audiences that have been ignored or underserved don’t need to be convinced that journalism matters, they need to see that it’s for them. And news organizations that prioritize hard-to-reach audiences will be rewarded with something the industry desperately needs: durable relationships.

The industry has long justified its focus on affluent readers by arguing that other audiences are too hard to reach or too difficult to monetize. But the past few years have made clear that this strategy is not a path to stability — not for journalism, and not for our country. As platforms remain volatile and advertising continues to erode, loyalty and not scale is the scarce resource. And loyalty comes from care.

This shift will require uncomfortable changes, rethinking what success looks like. Newsrooms will need to value depth over volume, engagement over impressions. Audience work will need cultural fluency, not just platform expertise. Journalists will need permission to answer questions and intervene, not just publish and move on. Funders will need to recognize that relationship-building is not overhead — it is the journalism.

My prediction for 2026 is that the most resilient news organizations will be the ones that stop asking how big they can get and start asking who they’re accountable to. The future of journalism won’t be built by chasing low-hanging fruit. It will be built by choosing audiences and standing by them.