Telling a better audience story with Rich Murphy and Lindsay Horrgan

BY LIZ MOOREHEAD, BEELER.TECH

When Rich Murphy and Lindsay Horrigan sat down at Navigator NYC, the conversation landed on one of the biggest shifts publishers are working through right now: audience is no longer something publishers can treat as an automatic byproduct of making good content.

For years, especially in consumer media, the model trained publishers to think differently. You made the content, distributed it through the right channels, and the audience showed up. Google, social, and the broader open web handled a lot of the discovery work. Scale was the story, and in many cases, it was enough.

That era is over. Or at least, it’s no longer reliable enough to build the business around.

Lindsay, who is consumer growth officer at Hearst, brought a marketer’s view to the conversation. Her career has moved between brand-side roles at companies like Amex and Wayfair and publisher-side roles at Bloomberg and Hearst. That background gives her a different read on the current moment. In her view, publishers have to get much more intentional about demand. They can’t only capture demand when it appears. They have to create it.

Publishers have to think more like brands

“Publishers need to think like brands” is one of those lines that sounds simple until someone asks what it actually means. Lindsay gave it a practical definition.

It starts with the fundamentals. What do you stand for? What do you make? Who is it for? Why should someone choose you instead of someone else? How do you talk about that in a way that connects across the business?

That audience story can’t change completely depending on who is hearing it. Advertisers, consumers, subscribers, and internal teams may need different versions of the story, but the center has to hold. If the consumer story and the advertiser story have nothing to do with each other, something is off.

This is where consumer publishers can learn from B2B media. B2B publishers have always had to know who they were for because they couldn’t pretend to be for everyone. They had to understand their ideal audience, where to find them, what they needed, and how to create something specific enough to earn attention.

Consumer media had the luxury of scale for a long time. Now, even large publishers need to be more precise about who they serve and how they reach them.

Audience quality is becoming a bright spot

From AAM’s view across news, consumer, and B2B media, Rich sees audience becoming one of the stronger areas for publishers. That’s not because audience is easy. It’s because the economics are changing.

Publishers are finding more value from audiences even when those audiences are smaller. Subscription revenue is part of that. So are direct advertising, programmatic opportunities, and data-driven products. At the same time, buyers are showing more interest in quality inventory, brand-safe environments, and inclusion lists that identify publishers they trust.

This creates an opening. If advertisers are moving from quantity to quality, publishers need to be able to show the quality of the audience, not just the size of it. That requires better data, better packaging, and better proof.

It also requires publishers to stop treating audience development as one team’s job.

A direct audience relationship takes real infrastructure

Lindsay talked about Hearst’s investment in consumer growth, including email, newsletters, registration, and other ways to build stronger direct relationships with readers. But she was clear that “just build a newsletter” undersells the work.

First, you have to give someone a reason to hand over an email address. That value exchange could be content, utility, access, personalization, or a better experience. Then you need the infrastructure to deliver on that promise across brands, products, and business models.

Email can bring someone back to the site, but it can also deliver value on its own. It can help move audiences across brands. It can create stronger signals for the data infrastructure. It can support subscriptions, commerce, advertising, and loyalty.

The bigger point is that audience development has to become more intentional. Publishers can’t rely on SEO muscle memory, generic promotion, or a “push it out and see what happens” mindset. They have to market their own work with the same discipline they’d expect from any other brand selling a product.

First-party data is part of the audience story

The conversation also moved into first-party data and the tension publishers face when asking readers for more information. In consumer media and news, too much friction can hurt conversion. Nobody wants to ask a reader for household income the moment they land on an article.

Lindsay’s point was that publishers need a mix. Third-party data can still help with segmentation and targeting, but first-party data remains one of the strongest levers for building a richer audience story. The key is asking for information in moments where the value exchange makes sense.

A reader may not want to answer random profile questions. But if you ask what city they live in so you can stop sending them irrelevant local coverage, the request feels connected to the experience. Over time, those moments help build a profile that improves the product, the relationship, and the commercial opportunity.

The silo problem is now an audience problem

One of the strongest audience comments came from the room. A publisher described a familiar issue: editorial promos, affiliate promos, subscription offers, advertising units, and consumer marketing messages all competing for attention on the same page, often through systems that don’t talk to each other.

That creates a bad reader experience and a bad business decision. If every team optimizes its own space without a shared view of the user, the page becomes a battlefield.

Lindsay agreed that breaking down those silos is now part of the work. Audience cuts across product, engineering, editorial, growth, ad ops, commerce, subscriptions, and sales. Everyone has a role, but that only works when teams look at the same data and make decisions against the same audience strategy.

As she put it, everyone owns the audience. The hard part is figuring out what that means in practice.

Off-platform audiences still count, but they aren’t yours

The group also talked about YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other off-platform environments. The tension is familiar: publishers need to show up where audiences spend time, but those audiences are harder to own, measure, and monetize.

Lindsay’s answer was pragmatic. Publishers have to do both. They need direct audience relationships on owned channels, but they also need to create content that works natively on the platforms where people already are.

Treating every off-platform post as a funnel back to the website can fall flat. People can tell when the content doesn’t belong there. At the same time, building entirely on platforms you don’t control creates real risk.

The balance is to treat off-platform as part of a broader audience strategy, not as a replacement for owned relationships.

Trust needs proof

The session closed with a question from an independent publisher about validation. Large media brands can often rely on name recognition, but smaller and independent publishers need ways to prove who their audience is, where they have authority, and why buyers should trust them.

Rich pointed to AAM’s role in third-party validation, including traffic, impressions, social metrics, and data that agencies can access through their systems. His point was that buyers often don’t ask publishers to send reports anymore. They go directly to the sources they trust.

For publishers, especially smaller ones, that makes proof part of the audience story. It’s no longer enough to say, “This is who we reach.” Publishers need data, validation, and cross-channel reporting that helps buyers understand the full picture.

The better audience story is bigger than media kits

The takeaway from Rich and Lindsay’s conversation is that audience strategy can’t sit in a deck or a department. It has to show up in how publishers grow, package, monetize, and protect their relationships with readers.

Publishers need to know who they’re for. They need to invest in direct relationships. They need to market their work with more intention. They need to connect systems that were built separately. They need to treat off-platform audiences as part of the picture without pretending they own them. And they need proof that helps buyers understand quality, not just reach.

The audience story is becoming one of the most important stories publishers can tell. But it only works if the story is true across the whole business.

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