The Audience Almanac: A Seasonal Framework for Intentional Engagement

A note of gratitude: This framework builds on a growing body of community-first practice, including work by Hearken, the Listening Post Collective and Trusting News — organizations whose thinking on listening and audience-first journalism has shaped this field.

When I moved from the newsroom into ecosystem work, I was coming from having built something from the ground up — with intention.

At The 19th, Emily Ramshaw and I and our founding team had the privilege of naming an audience before we published a single story. We could ask: who, exactly, are we here for? What do they need from us that they can’t get anywhere else? And we could build every decision — editorial, product and revenue — from that foundation.

That experience of building audience-first, intentionally, from day one, underscored something I’ve carried into every consulting engagement since: our internal processes and systems shape the end results for our readers and communities far more than we acknowledge. You can’t separate how you work from who you serve.

When I transitioned into consulting — working across the news ecosystem with publishers with various missions, sizes and models — this theme of alignment emerged again and again. The publishers building audience-first solutions successfully were also taking the time to get their internal systems in shape.

The work feels massive. Where to start?

A growing number of publishers want to center their audiences with greater intention. They know it matters. They’ve heard the research, attended the trainings, crafted the mission statements.

But the work feels massive — and so they try to do everything at once. They broadcast and listen and build community and analyze metrics and plan campaigns all in the same week, never going deep enough in any direction to see results. They feel behind before they’ve started.

What I’ve observed, across publishers large and small, well-resourced and scrappy, is that audience development doesn’t suffer from a shortage of good ideas. It suffers from a shortage of focus.

This framework is my attempt to give publishers permission — and a practical structure — to tackle this work in stretches of focus that are far more doable, and far more impactful.

Enter, the almanac.

An almanac is a farmer’s planning guide — a calendar rooted in natural cycles, built on the understanding that different seasons call for different kinds of work. You don’t plant in winter. You don’t rest in harvest. Each phase has a purpose, and rushing any one of them costs you later.

Audience engagement works the same way. The four seasons of this framework map to four essential phases:

Spring: Define.  Summer: Listen.  Autumn: Build.  Winter: Sustain.

These aren’t sequential steps you complete once. They’re a cycle — one that repeats and deepens with each pass. The goal isn’t to finish the cycle. It’s to know which season you’re in, and to do that season’s work well.

🌱  Spring: Define (Planting the seeds)

The almanac analogy: Farmers don’t plant without knowing their soil and climate. They select seeds intentionally, for their specific conditions.

The Define phase is about getting specific. Not just “we serve our community” but: which community members, what they need, and why your outlet is positioned to serve them better than anyone else.

Publishers who skip this phase — who jump straight to content production or community-building — often find themselves months down the road wondering why their engagement isn’t growing. The answer is almost always rooted here: the audience was never clearly named.

Key activities in Spring:

• Define your target audience with specificity — demographics, lived experience and information needs, and what they’re NOT getting elsewhere.

• Set clear engagement goals. What does success look like in six months? In a year?

• Establish your KPIs — but choose metrics that reflect civic impact, not just reach. Open rates and pageviews matter, but so do community trust signals.

• Develop a communication strategy: what channels, what voice, what cadence?

Key question: If you described your most important reader to a colleague, could they pick her out of a crowd?

☀️  Summer: Listen (Tending the crops)

The almanac analogy: Summer is active tending — monitoring, watering, protecting. Farmers don’t plant and walk away. They pay close attention.

The Listen phase is about building real feedback loops — not just monitoring metrics, but hearing from your audience directly. This is where a lot of publishers underinvest. They track traffic but don’t ask readers what’s missing. They watch open rates but never text a subscriber to ask what story they wish existed.

Some of the most effective listening practices I’ve seen are also the simplest. The 19th asks every new subscriber: How did you hear about us? What stories are missing from the news? Those answers offer insights in ways an analytics dashboard simply can’t.

Key activities in Summer:

• Monitor social media for what your audience says about your coverage — not just engagement metrics, but sentiment and gaps.

• Analyze website behavior with curiosity, not just performance pressure. What are readers looking for that they’re not finding?

• Run short surveys or reader polls — even a single question sent monthly builds a habit of feedback.

• Show up in the spaces where your audience already gathers: WhatsApp groups, community events, local Facebook groups.

• Read your support tickets, your reply-to emails, your DMs. These are reader dispatches. Treat them as such.

Key question: When did you last hear something from a reader that surprised you?

🍂  Autumn: Build (The harvest)

The almanac analogy: Autumn is the harvest — the fruits of intentional planting and careful tending. The work here is collecting, sharing and distributing.

The Build phase is where publishers often spend most of their energy — creating content, responding to readers, running events — but without the grounding of Spring and Summer, they're building about their audience, not with them. 

When you've done the Define and Listen work first, that changes. You're not guessing at what your audience needs. You're building from what they've already told you.

Key activities in Autumn:

• Create content that is directly responsive to what you heard in Summer — and tell your readers that’s what you’re doing. Closing the loop builds trust.

• Respond to audience feedback visibly and specifically. Not just “thanks for your input” but “you told us X, so we did Y.”

• Build community infrastructure: newsletters, events, WhatsApp channels and membership programs — whatever fits your model and your audience’s habits.

• Invest in your customer service and reader experience. The way someone feels when they reach out to you shapes whether they stay.

Key question: Are you building about your audience, or with them?

❄️  Winter: Sustain (Rest and prepare)

The almanac analogy: Winter is for resting, analyzing the harvest and maintaining tools, and planning the next planting season. It’s strategic — not idle.

This is the phase most publishers skip, or feel guilty about. But Winter is what makes the next cycle better. It’s where you step back from execution and ask: what did we learn?

I’ve seen publishers run excellent audience-building programs and then immediately pivot to the next campaign without pausing to analyze what worked, what didn’t, and why. That institutional knowledge evaporates. The next cycle starts from scratch instead of from strength.

Key activities in Winter:

• Audit your engagement metrics from the past cycle — not just what performed, but what it signals about your audience’s evolving needs.

• Update your audience definition and your KPIs based on what you learned. Your audience is not static; your understanding of them shouldn’t be either.

• Maintain relationships with key community members even when you’re not in active campaign mode. Sustain, don’t just sprint.

• Evaluate your tools and platforms. Is your tech stack serving your audience strategy, or constraining it?

• Draft your roadmap for the next cycle. Spring comes whether you’re ready or not.

Key question: What would you do differently next cycle — and have you actually written it down?

What season is your newsroom in right now?

Before you start planning your next audience initiative, take five minutes with these questions:

• On Define: Can you describe your primary audience in two specific sentences — not in mission statement terms, but as actual people who have problems to solve?

• On Listen: In the past 30 days, have you received direct, qualitative feedback from readers — not traffic data, but actual voices?

• On Build: Is your most recent content initiative directly traceable to something your audience told you they needed?

• On Sustain: When did you last formally review your audience strategy and update it based on what you’ve learned?

• The big one: Which phase are you currently neglecting — and what’s one thing you could do this week to tend to it?

There are no wrong answers here. The goal is clarity about where you are in the cycle — so you can do that season’s work with focus, instead of trying to do every season at once.

One more thing.

The almanac isn’t a prescription. It’s a permission structure.

Permission to stop trying to be everything to everyone, all at once. Permission to go deep in one direction before moving to the next. Permission to rest and reflect without feeling like you’re falling behind.

The publishers I’ve seen build the most durable audience relationships aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tech stacks. They’re the ones who know their audience with specificity, listen to them consistently, build in genuine response to what they hear, and return to the beginning of the cycle, curious about what they still don’t know.

The almanac is a place to start. What season are you in? 

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This framework is featured in the April edition of the Audience Almanac newsletter. Subscribe at thisisagencia.com/newsletter.

The Business Case for WhatsApp-First Publishing

Juan Andrés Muñoz launched Pamplonews in 2022 to fill the gap in local, independent coverage of Pamplona. The hyperlocal newsroom centers everyday life, public services and civic power in the city’s neighborhoods.

Meet Pamplonews founder Juan Andrés Muñoz, who’s building a local newsroom inside WhatsApp — and charting the path to monetizing messaging

AGENCIA: What problem were you trying to solve when you first launched Pamplonews as a WhatsApp-first product?

JUAN ANDRÉS: The problem wasn't a lack of news outlets. Pamplona actually has several. The problem was that none of them were built for how people actually want to consume local news today. Existing outlets were either politically divisive, wrote in stiff "journalism jargon" that felt distant and artificial, or failed to focus on what people genuinely need. I wanted to create something different: a news source that prioritized utility over ideology, connection over division, and clarity over complexity. No performative outrage, no complicated prose trying to sound Important: just straightforward, conversational reporting on things that actually matter to daily life in Pamplona.

WhatsApp was the perfect medium for that vision because it's inherently conversational and intimate. The platform itself demanded a more human tone. You can't write in pompous newspaper-speak when you're appearing right next to someone's chat with their mom. WhatsApp forced us to be clear, concise, and genuinely useful, because if we weren't, people would just mute us. That constraint made the content better and more focused on what the community actually needed.

A: Why did WhatsApp feel like the right place to solve that problem, especially for a Spanish-language audience?

JA: In Spain, WhatsApp it’s not an app people use: it's the app. Everyone from teenagers to grandparents has it, checks it constantly, and trusts it for important information. Unlike in the U.S. where messaging is fragmented across iMessage, SMS, and various platforms, Spain is a WhatsApp monoculture with over 90% penetration. For local news, that universality is everything. I didn't need to convince anyone to download something new or check another website.

Spanish communication culture is inherently social and immediate. People share news through WhatsApp groups with family and friends constantly. By publishing there directly, we were plugging straight into how information already flows.

And this is not theory, we have proved it time and again. We have built several web apps that work well initially when we promote them, but then they lose steam because they are not as sticky as WhatsApp is. So our approach now is always “Think WhatsApp first… and only”.

A: Many U.S. publishers still treat WhatsApp as experimental. What do you think they misunderstand most about the platform?

JA: They misunderstand that WhatsApp isn't social media: it's infrastructure. U.S. publishers keep waiting for WhatsApp to "prove itself" the way they waited on Twitter or TikTok, but that's the wrong mental model.

WhatsApp is closer to SMS or email: it's how people actually communicate every single day, not a platform they visit when they're bored.

The biggest mistake is treating it like a nice-to-have distribution experiment instead of a primary communication channel. American publishers are so focused on building apps, optimizing for Google, and chasing social algorithms that they're overlooking the fact that their audience is already on WhatsApp, checking it 20+ times a day, and would gladly receive news there if someone just showed up consistently.

A: Can you walk us through how your WhatsApp setup works at scale, especially using communities instead of groups or channels?

JA: We chose WhatsApp Communities very deliberately because they offer the best balance between privacy, intimacy, and scalability. Let me break down why we didn't go with the other options:

Why not Groups? WhatsApp Groups expose everyone's phone numbers to all members, which is a non-starter for privacy and GDPR compliance. You're also capped at 1,024 members, which severely limits growth potential.

Why not Channels? Channels solve the scale and privacy problems (unlimited subscribers, no exposed phone numbers) but they're impersonal and hidden away in a separate Updates tab. That isolation is the problem. People don't check the Updates tab with the same frequency or urgency as their main chat list. Channels feel like broadcast media, not community conversation. We lose the intimacy and the prime real estate of appearing directly among someone's personal conversations.

Why Communities work for us: They give us privacy without sacrificing presence. Subscribers don't see each other's phone numbers, but our newsletter still appears in their main chat interface alongside their personal conversations. That positioning is everything. When someone opens WhatsApp to check a message from a friend, they see our daily bulletin right there. We're part of their daily communication rhythm, not buried in a secondary tab they might check once a week. The CMS we built handles scheduling, content formatting, and distribution across these groups automatically. We draft once, preview how it'll look on mobile, schedule the send time, and the system handles delivery. Subscribers can mute notifications if they want to read on their own schedule, but the message is always waiting in their main chat list.

A: How does your system handle scheduling, analytics and content management compared to email-first platforms like Substack or Beehiiv?

JA: We actually studied platforms like Beehiiv pretty extensively: their editing workflow, analytics dashboards, and content management logic and used that as our north star when building our WhatsApp CMS. The goal was to create a similar level of functionality, but built for WhatsApp's unique constraints and opportunities rather than just adapting email tools.

Our CMS handles scheduling so we can queue up daily newsletters in advance and maintain our consistent send time without manual intervention. The content editor is optimized for WhatsApp's format and markdown. We can draft, preview exactly how messages will appear on mobile, and publish with one click.

On the analytics side, we track delivery rates, read receipts (where available), link click-throughs and subscriber growth/churn. The system we built is lean, robust, and serves our needs beautifully. Could it do everything Beehiiv does? No. But it does everything a WhatsApp publisher actually needs.

A: What was the first WhatsApp monetization approach that actually worked for you, and what failed before that?

JA: The first thing that actually worked was partnerships with event organizers. Local cultural events, concerts, exhibitions, festivals… these were natural fits for our audience because Pamplona has such a strong events calendar, and people genuinely wanted to know what was happening each weekend. Event organizers needed reach, and we had a highly engaged local audience checking their phones daily. It was a clean exchange of value.

What failed before that? My expectations. I came in assuming I could command higher CPMs or charge rates comparable to what larger digital publishers were getting. The reality is that local businesses are really struggling financially and they did not understand the value of WhatsApp as a distribution channel because they were too used to the local radio, local newspaper, or their own Instagram accounts. I had to lower my expectations and adjust to what the market was willing to pay, and it was a bit frustrating.

A: For publishers just starting out, what’s a realistic first monetization goal on WhatsApp?

JA: Your first immediate goal shouldn't be direct monetization. I think it should be proving subscriber value and building retention. WhatsApp is a trust-based medium where people let you into their most personal communication space. If you push sponsorships or other monetization strategies before establishing that relationship, you'll lose subscribers faster than you gain them.

Spend your first 6-12 months aiming for 500-1,000 engaged local subscribers, tracking click-through rates, and demonstrating that WhatsApp is a viable distribution channel worth investing in. Once you've built that foundation, indirect monetization is your lowest-hanging fruit via local business partnerships for sponsored posts and events promotion, with a realistic first-year goal of 500-1,500 usd/month from these indirect revenue streams, enough to cover costs and prove the business model has legs.

A: Any publisher building on WhatsApp is ultimately dependent on Meta. How do you think about that risk and do you have contingency plans in place?

JA: Platform dependency is a real risk and I'd be naive to ignore it. Meta can change policies or sunset features with little warning. Those shifts could potentially change how we operate on the platform overnight. That said, I think about this risk differently than I would with algorithmic platforms like Facebook or Instagram. WhatsApp is fundamentally a direct communication channel: I own the relationship with my subscribers in a way I don't on social media. There's no algorithm deciding whether my audience sees my message. The dependency is on the infrastructure, not on Meta's favor or reach.

Internally we have considered different scenarios if things would change. One of our contingency plans is reverting to email, which is probably the most resilient, platform-independent channel we have as publishers. If WhatsApp disappeared tomorrow, we would lose immediacy and convenience, but we wouldn't lose our entire audience.

But honestly, I would lose one big incentive to do what I do. The reality is that every digital distribution channel involves platform dependency. For us, WhatsApp's risk is acceptable because the platform has 2+ billion users globally and deep penetration in Spain. It's not going anywhere soon. Besides, the direct-messaging model is inherently less fragile than algorithmic discovery.

A: What kinds of content consistently drive the highest engagement on WhatsApp, and how do you balance staying present without overwhelming subscribers?

JA: The content that drives the highest engagement for us is hyper-local and genuinely useful to daily life: housing updates (especially subsidized housing opportunities and application deadlines); job postings and employment opportunities; discounts and sweepstakes; food and gastronomy (In Navarra, food isn't just a topic, it's practically a religion)

We're disciplined about volume. We send one message per day, Monday through Friday, with each newsletter capped at roughly 5,000 characters. This constraint forces us to be ruthlessly editorial, only the most relevant stories and events make the cut, which means subscribers trust that when we show up in their inbox, it's worth reading. On Fridays, we send a weekend edition too that's more event-oriented and leisure-focused: things to do, cultural events.

A: What excites you most about WhatsApp’s future for news publishers in the next 1–2 years? How can small or mid-size U.S. newsrooms start piloting this now?

JA: What excites me most is that WhatsApp is finally being recognized as a primary distribution channel rather than just a social media afterthought and we should see more innovation in the space. I've seen firsthand that people check their messaging apps multiple times a day, far more consistently than they open news apps or visit websites. The platform's nearly universal adoption means you're meeting audiences where they already are, not asking them to download yet another app or remember another URL.

For small or mid-size U.S. newsrooms who want to pilot this model, I would start small and focused. These are some pointers based on my experience:

• Choose one beat or newsletter to pilot: pick your strongest vertical and create a dedicated community for it

• Promote the WhatsApp community where your audience already is: make it a one-click subscribe. The friction is minimal.

• Start posting just once a day, and provide a CLEAR VALUE: write like you talk to a friend. Keep messages concise but packed with information and action-oriented.

• Track your metrics: track every link you share so you can measure which stories drive interest and guide your editorial efforts..

The beautiful thing about WhatsApp is that it requires almost no budget to start. For small newsrooms stretched thin, that's a massive built-in audience. You're essentially inserting your newsroom into people's daily communication habits, and that's where sustainable audience relationships are built.

A: If you could have only one app on your phone - what would it be and why?

JA: Besides the Phone app itself, I'd have to say WhatsApp (Agencia : 😆), not just because it's my primary tool for Pamplonews, but because it's become the communication backbone for my entire work and personal life.

That said, if I'm being honest about what I actually use obsessively: it's a tie between Inoreader and Raindrop.io. Inoreader is my newsroom in my pocket. Raindrop.io is where I save and organize everything. Together, they're essentially my external brain for content creation.

A: If you could capture 2026 (so far) in a song, what would it be?

JA: "The Promise" by When in Rome. Partly because I recently attended a special 20th anniversary screening of "Napoleon Dynamite" with my oldest daughter and the cast, and hearing that song again in that context hit differently.

But beyond the nostalgia, there's something about its optimistic, forward-moving energy that perfectly captures where I am with Pamplonews this year. It's a song about commitment and momentum, about showing up and delivering on what you've promised.

A: How can publishers work with you?

JA: I can help media organizations develop and optimize their WhatsApp content distribution strategy. Drawing from my hands-on experience building Pamplonews' audience through WhatsApp, I guide publishers on best practices for audience engagement, content formats, automation workflows and growth tactics specific to the platform.

Publishers can also leverage the custom CMS we've built specifically for WhatsApp newsletter management. This system streamlines the entire process — from content creation/edition and scheduling to distribution and performance tracking — making it easier for newsrooms to maintain consistent, high-quality WhatsApp communications without the technical overhead and the burden of manually sending your messages.

Get in touch with Juan Andrés »

This Q&A was edited by Daniela Tabata.

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Congratulations to the Latino Media Consortium, a Press Forward grantee 🎉

I am beyond excited to share that Press Forward has awarded the Latino Media Consortium a $750,000 grant—an important show of support for independent, community-first media at a critical time for Latino audiences. Read more from LMC:

The Latino Media Consortium (LMC) is deeply proud to be a recipient of a $750,000 infrastructure grant from Press Forward, a national philanthropic initiative dedicated to revitalizing local news. LMC is one of just 22 organizations funded in Press Forward’s most recent Open Call, a $22.7 million commitment designed to strengthen the backbone of the news ecosystem nationwide. For us, this investment is more than a financial milestone - it’s a vote of confidence that Latino‑focused newsrooms belong at the center of America’s information future.

I co-founded LMC with Lucy Flores in 2024 as I was also building this consultancy, Agencia Media, to equip publishers and community organizations with the tools they need to center and serve diverse audiences in a tumultuous media age. With the support of Press Forward, LMC will now become a central focus of Agencia’s work supporting the publishers who serve the nation’s 65 million Latinos. 

Over the next two years, I will be leading LMC’s capacity-building efforts for member publishers, helping them tackle operational hurdles to unlock growth and sustainability. Our capacity-building services will be coupled with direct investment, combining funding with coaching so every lesson can lead to real growth. And just as our publishers employ a community-first approach, so will we: we listen first, then help translate data into actionable solutions. 

Join Us: Call for Consultants & Coaching Partners

If you’re a consultant or coach with experience in audience development (especially Latine and bilingual audiences), business modeling, newsroom operations, or revenue innovation—and if you care deeply about the future of Latino media—I’d love to hear from you. 

Please complete this brief form and tell us about how you can help. There’s never been a more important time to come together to ensure Latino communities have the news they need and deserve.

Thank you!
Amanda