This article was produced as part of the NPA Summit 2023 student newsroom. Learn more about this year’s students and the event.

Knowing how your audience will react to your product is as difficult as seeing the future. But asking your audience great research questions will lead to early product insight and guide your organization’s overall strategy. 

Reilly Kneedler, Wick Communication’s digital audience editor, and Kristy Roschke, Arizona State University’s media literacy educator, hosted the practice session “101 questions to ask your audience” during the 2023 News Product Alliance Summit. Kneedler and Roschke worked alongside participants to build a definitive list of questions you can incorporate into your own surveys and interviews. 

Questions were created by participants and pulled from the experts’ work in the Voices Listening Project, a 2022 research project that found that while most people are consuming news about their communities, local journalism has work to do when it comes to both diversifying content and gaining community trust.

Here are highlights from the practice session.

Brainstorm questions

Having a brainstorm session with your team is key in beginning your approach to customer research. It will help everyone align their thinking to the same goal, but also allow different approaches to develop.

Here are some questions that were crafted during a brainstorming session.

• What is interesting about our content?

• What is the value we can bring to our audience?

• Is there a running theme we can condense into a hook or selling line?

• How diverse is our audience?

• How do you get your news? What various ways do you find out about anything/information/events/news

• What mood are you in when you get the news?

• How do they feel after receiving/reading/listening to news?

• What is the biggest user need in a news app?

• Does a newspaper need an app?

• How do we better engage a subscriber to use our app?

• What makes a subscriber come back to our product/app/website other than content?

These questions can be categorized into three basic groups: whether they are directed at the audience, the organization or the product you are introducing. 

When brainstorming questions, Kneedler said “it is important to focus on quantity over quality, although the end goal is quality questions.” You want to have a broad range of questions that vary in specificity and category. This will inspire thinking into different directions and more quality questions when you refine the brainstorm session. 

Refine the questions

After brainstorming as many questions as possible, compare your questions to what you want to know about your audience. Ask yourself:

• What is the research goal?

• Who is the target audience?

• Where will this research be applied?

• What does the success of the product or research look like?

Roschke emphasized that you need to have a goal attached to your research. This will lead to better cohesion between your questions, keep them focused and easier to send to your audience.

Research methods

After refining your audience research questions, consider these common methods to distribute your questions. These will be listed by how much time or resources each method requires: Usability testing, stakeholder interviews, focus groups, listening/town hall sessions and longform surveys. 

Usability tests can also be seen as beta testing. These tests are dependent on having at least a prototype of your product that users can experience for themself and give feedback. This will take up resources and time, and should take place fairly down the product timeline, but will give you the most direct information about your product. 

One session participant shared her own experience with usability testing and how it was more challenging than expected. 

Stakeholder interviews will result in the most specific and quality answers from your audience. You may have standard questions that do not change from interview to interview, but you will be able to expand on the unique answers your individual stakeholders give. These interviews will take up the most time and resources. 

Then there are focus groups, which are just group interviews. This will provide quality answers but risk individuals being influenced by each other.

On a much larger scale, you can use listening or town hall sessions. This allows audiences to speak directly to you or the organization about what they want from the product or from the organization. 

The last research method discussed was the longform survey. Surveys are best for multiple choice questions that let your audience rate how they feel or how frequently they do something. These may look like the following: “How often do you consume this newspaper? Frequently, sometimes, or never?” These surveys can be lengthy due to how quickly audiences can answer the questions.

Audience research is a key piece of any successful product development cycle,” Kneedler said. “Asking the right questions will allow you to be effective in product development and help create the best distribution of your product to the audience.”

Here are some more of those “right questions,” created during the brainstorming session, that you can use during your own audience research. 

Demographic questions

• Are you news-aware? 

• Are you socially active or passive?

• Are there any biases within the audience?

• What neighborhood do you live in?

• When people ask you where you live, what do you say?

• How old are you? How old are you in your mind (you mental age, not your biological age)

• Which generation do you identify with?

• What nationality / ethnicity are you?

• Where do you live?

• Do you live with school-aged children?

• What is your occupation?

• How many people are in your household?

• What is your yearly income?

• What are your hobbies?

• What do you define as your “community”?

• How reliable is your internet access? (Do you have wi-fi available at home?)

• What local organization are you a part of? 

Product mission questions

• Do we want to cause a positive or negative reaction?

• Are we looking to inspiring action or thought?

• How will our product or service help or make things easier for the audience?

• What value do we provide our audience? 

• How can we better serve their needs?

• Who are we missing? 

• How do we measure the impact of our journalism?

• What can we do better? How can we improve the reading experience?

• What pain points do you experience when consuming our content? 

• Does each product we produce appeal as an independent brand in our audience’s minds?

Product + Audience questions

• What are the preexisting troubles for the audience?

• Is the audience apprehensive, excited or passive about the product?

• What might become a challenge for the audience when using/learning our product?

• What motivates the audience to use this product and not others?

• What can be used to motivate the audience to search out this product?

• What makes a non-subscriber come back to our product/app/website other than content?

• Do our subscribers prefer to receive information in an app or visit our site?

• What are the reasons that lead our subscribers to open a newsletter?

• Why did you open this email? Subject line, topic, other?

• Do you feel like our organization does a ____ job of providing context and nuance around [TOPIC]? Rate from Great, Good, Average, Bad to Horrible

• What words do you associate with our brand?

• What do you think we write about/do?

• What is your familiarity with our organization?

• Are you aware we’re a nonprofit newsroom?

• Do you know what being a nonprofit newsroom means?

• Do you understand why giving money is important?

• How willing are you to give money to us, as a nonprofit?

• How willing are you to donate to our nonprofit, reader-supported newsroom? 

• What’s something that frustrated you on our site?

• What’s something that delighted you? 

Audience habits questions

• How do you, an audience member, know if the news you receive is trusted and valid?

• What are you usually doing when you check the news? Getting ready for work, getting ready for bed, etc. 

• What time are you checking the news?

• When you go and seek news, what do you turn to?

• When you let the news come to you, how is it usually manifested/what ways do you usually get the information?

• What job are you looking for the news to fulfill? Why do you read the news? Watch the news? Listen to the news?

• What are your expectations of the people who report the news?

• How much time do you usually spend on reading/the news?

• How do our subscribers get information?

• Which social networks do they use?

• What are the reasons why our subscribers do not renew their subscription?

• What sources do they use to inform themselves? Local or international?

• When you’re looking to go deeper on a topic, where do you go? Search, social media, podcasts, etc.

• What digital subscriptions do you pay for?

• Would you pay for any content that we have right now? Why or why not?

• What was the last subscription you canceled and why?

• Are you on TikTok? Would you welcome content from us on TikTok?

• How often do you check your email?Do you use a phone or computer to check your email?

• Where did you find us? How did you hear about us?

• Which platforms/products are the most useful? 

• How often do you check out our content? (Daily, weekly, monthly)

• How do you prefer to get your news and information (email, app, push)?

• How does our audience define us? 

• What are our listeners listening to when they're not consuming our content?

• Are our listeners sharing our podcasts with others after they listen?

• Are our listeners discussing stories we tell via private channels (like WhatsApp and other IMs)?

Audience interest questions

• What formats are you seeking out when you come to our site? E.g., Deeper analysis, breaking news?

• What problems are you trying to solve?

• What features are most important to you?

• What are you watching/reading/listening to right now?

• What do you like about these news organizations that make you subscribe/come back?

• What don’t you currently get from these news sources - what leaves you unsatisfied?

• What is a story that you read recently that has stuck with you?

• Would you like to get to know the people in your community better? OR Do you know the individuals in your community well?

• What are subjects you wish you had more information about regarding your local area? 

• Do you know the city council who represents your area?

• What are your goals and motivations?

• How do we make your experience more valuable to you?

In-house questions

• How do we expand our small community newspaper to become more product oriented?

• How do we get our editorial staff to follow the best practices of a design/layout?

• What is the organization’s role within a community?

• Is niche content with a broad appeal helping find a new audience or building a deeper relationship with existing audiences?

• Is the organization targeting age, gender, economic status, etc?

• What communities are we unaware of? 

• How can we engage with them authentically?

• What is the best way to reach readers with our survey? 

• What is the best length for a survey? 

• How often should we survey readers?

• Is a survey the best way to gauge readers’ opinions? What other methods might be explored? 

• How representative are responses, given the sample size and the fact that readers are “opting in”? 

• How can we filter out the “crap”? 

• How can we incentivize readers to provide feedback? 

• How can we make it easier/faster to get reader feedback? 

• How to deal with unwanted attention from segment groups we didn't intentionally address in our content?

• What are some technical issues our listeners may be experiencing via third party players (example: Apple Podcasts or Spotify) that we might be unaware of or have no control over?