User Needs Model

Dmitry Shishkin’s User Needs model is a framework that categorizes why people consume news into eight core needs, grouped under four motivations:

• Fact-driven (Update me, Keep me engaged)
• Context-driven (Educate me, Give me perspective)
• Emotion-driven (Divert me, Inspire me)
• Action-driven (Connect me, Help me)

Originally developed and implemented at the BBC, the model has since been widely adopted across the journalism industry as a way to better understand audience motivations and tailor coverage.

While our modular journalism project uses a different terminology — focusing on user information needs and user effects — we’ve found that our atomic components can, in practice, be mapped meaningfully onto Shishkin’s model. The overlap may be conceptual, but it’s operationally useful.

What follows is an initial attempt at grading our user information needs against Shishkin’s framework. A more rigorous taxonomy is still needed, but it’s already clear that small changes — such as adding or removing just a few information needs within a modular story — can reposition that story across the user needs spectrum.

This research into modularity wasn’t conceived as a marketing strategy. Its original purpose was to explore how journalism might better serve underrepresented or underserved audiences.

However, if Shishkin’s wheel is a proven engagement tool — and modular content allows a newsroom to address multiple user needs with just a few additional paragraphs — then modularity itself can be leveraged as a strategic advantage, both editorially and commercially.

You can read more about Shishkin’s work and download the white paper here.