A happy mid-week to everyone!

If you’re reading this newsletter, it likely means newsletters are at least one of your sources of news. Five years ago, was this also how you kept yourself updated with current affairs? 

My mom, a senior citizen, is a big fan of video blogs or vlogs by famous news personalities. With just her smartphone, she listens to hours-long social and political commentary. She echoes the behavior of the 50.7% of young Filipinos who consume vlogs, the highest rate among countries, according to Digital 2024, a yearly report on social media trends.

My husband loves listening to podcasts. He whiles away hours stuck in traffic by tuning in to his favorite rock climbing or economics podcasts. 

We all consume news in different ways. Different from each other, but also different from our news habits years ago. 

A major component of this is a simple but comprehensive online survey now open for anyone to fill out. We’ll be putting out other versions of this survey through pop-ups on our site. We’re also holding focus group discussions with key target groups to gain even deeper insights.

“The Listening Project” is partly the fruit of my year at Stanford University as a John S. Knight International Journalism Fellow where I learned about something called design research and need-finding.

This approach to designing a product means designing with intention and putting the needs of your audience or end user first. It’s about using a variety of methods to understand both the explicit and implicit needs of your audience. Implicit needs are the hardest to identify. These are the values, beliefs, and motivations that underpin the behavior of the end user. But it is through understanding these kinds of needs that we’re hoping we can get to “the why” of our community, and thus better design a product that speaks to that “why.”

Rappler CEO Maria Ressa wrote about massive media layoffs and social media platforms limiting the ways our readers find our journalism. This is why it’s imperative that newsrooms find better ways to reach our community, ways that don’t rely on the big tech platforms. This is why we created our Rappler Communities app. This is also why we’ve started “The Listening Project.” By participating in it, you help us serve your needs better. This will help us survive. 

We hope you take our survey! – Rappler.com

Be The Good is a newsletter that comes out every other Wednesday. We deliver updates straight to your inbox on how journalism and communities can work together for impact.

To subscribe, follow the #FactsFirstPH movement or visit rappler.com/profile and click the Newsletters tab. Create a Rappler account that helps you manage your newsletter subscriptions.