We all know what the news is right? If you’re here and somehow you don’t… I think I’ve failed at my job.

But there’s another question we need to be asking ourselves. What is news? No, that’s not a joke. I mean, it’s not really a product, not a commodity. Not even really a service. Instead, news falls into something completely different. It’s the newest economic offering: the experience economy.

An experience economy is exactly what it sounds like: an economy where consumers are no longer just demanding goods, they’re demanding an experience. If you went to a store and bought the ingredients for soup, that’s a commodity. Go to the store and get a premade can of Campbells, that’s a good. Get chili at a Wendy’s drive-thru, that’s a service. Walk into a fancy restaurant with ambiance, music, and have an overly-friendly waiter bring you soup… now you’ve had the experience.

So when we pay for a particular streaming service to watch our favorite newscast, give money to the paywall hiding a news article, or even just view advertisements on a piece of journalism– we’re engaging in the experience economy.

As Benjamin Toff wrote in Neiman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2026, “News is not merely the business of producing and distributing journalism; it is about the experience of staying informed.”

And that’s largely what the experience economy is about. Shifting the view of a company from just providing a good to a greater purpose. Computer companies aren’t just in the business of selling you a computer, they’re giving you access to endless information and experiences that happen to be accessible through a computer.

Now the question is: how do we utilize this “news experience” to better our reporting?

An experience economy capitalizes widely on our emotions. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore coined the term “Experience Economy” back in the late 1990s. They write that experience economies differ from other offerings because of the unique way they impact the consumer. 

“While prior economic offerings – commodities, goods, and services — are external to the buyer, experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level,” their 1998 Harvard Business Review article reads. “Thus, no two people can have the same experience, because each experience derives from the interaction between the staged event (like a theatrical play) and the individual’s state of mind.”

So appealing to emotion shouldn’t be too hard for us journalists. It’s a large part of what we already do. The goal is almost always to appeal to the emotions of our audience. And how have we always done that? Through our tone, delivery and design of whatever we are presenting.

At the simplest level, we have our imagery. This is what’s most frequently used to draw emotion in journalism. Be it the videos in a news package or the photos in an article, we can almost tell our viewers what to feel using the images we show them. A photo of a victim could invoke sadness, much like a video of a rescued puppy could invoke joy.

Even the design of our words can change the way our viewers feel. Almost all newspapers use a fairly plain, accessible serif font. It gives a sense of formality, stability and professionalism to our readers that can also strengthen our trustworthiness. Similarly, our grammar stylistic choices come from AP Style, the conventions that all journalists follow– also adding to our credibility.

We can even utilize colors to impact the way our viewers feel. We can take advantage of color psychology, like using yellow tones to invoke joy or red to bring out urgency and excitement. You can use tools like this emotional color wheel to know what tones to use where.

Take CNN’s Website for example. That bright red grabs our attention and gives us that sense of urgency, which fits perfectly with the hard-hitting and breaking news pieces they do.

Design is everywhere in the news, from our website layouts to the order the b-roll in your package goes. It’s important to use that to our advantage– to give the viewer what they want, and to get what we want in return.