Muscle Memory

Muscle memory is a powerful thing. After fifteen years of riding a bicycle with gear shifters down by the front wheel, I switched to a new-fangled one where they’re integrated into the brakes. When I hit a big hill or a hairy situation, I still find myself reaching down, grasping at air where my brain insists the shifters should be.

That reflex — useful once, but misfiring under new conditions — is a good metaphor for how journalism still operates.

One of journalism’s deepest habits is producing for a so-called “general audience.” Many legacy practices rest on a once-useful myth: that news products can serve large groups of people more or less equally well, without making hard tradeoffs explicit. That idea made sense in a more constrained media environment. Today, it mainly obscures reality.

The problem isn’t just that the general audience has fragmented. It’s that continuing to design as if it still exists hides the choices we’re already making — about tone, format, language, distribution, and attention — and lets us pretend those choices are neutral. Every product is for someone — which also means being willing to lose people it isn’t for, and to evolve as those boundaries shift.

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I was reminded of this over the holidays while working on a website to market my wife’s calendar for her brand, Lunalimón. This isn’t a journalism story, strictly speaking. But it is a story about making choices in public, seeing their effects, and deciding which reactions matter — which is exactly the habits journalism needs to learn beyond the few succeeding in the “winner takes most” competition.

She wanted to sell the calendar she designed and produced at a modest holiday discount to boost sales, so we experimented with how to present it.

At first, the discount appeared as a simple line item in the cart — same price everywhere, clearly reduced. We also set up a small Meta ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram. Traffic increased quickly. Clicks were happening, but conversions were not.

We tried again. Instead of surfacing the discount immediately, we offered it contextually: a small modal on the payment page, triggered only if someone lingered — interested, but uncertain. Nothing pushy. Just a quiet surprise. Sales ticked up.

Encouraged, we tested more visibility. We moved the same discount earlier in the flow, showing it on the landing page after a period of engagement. That backfired. Conversions dropped, especially among users who saw the discount on the landing page.

Same discount. Same design. Different placement. Very different behavior.

After several iterations, we found a reliable approach: showing the discount as a pop-over at checkout. Conversions stabilized at a little higher rate than before, but the tradeoffs of that approach also made themselves clear.

Someone messaged. They were confused and annoyed. Did the discount apply to each item, or all of them? Was it effectively the same as free shipping? Why wasn’t this clearer earlier? We responded politely and thoughtfully, but because of the success we’d seen reaching the core audience for the product, we didn’t redesign the flow to accommodate their concerns.

It was a reminder that every decision segments the audience — even the ones that feel neutral, and especially the ones that feel principled. A principled approach doesn’t assume everyone can be happy with your choices. The real questions are: who doesn’t this work for, why, and are we willing to live with that tradeoff?

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Journalism faces this choice constantly. Do we expend our energy building for a mythical “everyone,” or do we accept that clarity for some will always feel alienating to others?

This is where journalism’s muscle memory becomes a liability. We can’t control how audiences receive our work, but we can control how we present it — and whether we’re willing to notice when old habits stop working. I once had a senior editor scoff at the idea of editing a piece based on asking our summer intern what kind of lede the intern wanted to read. I admired that editor deeply, but in that moment they missed something important: the story wasn’t for them. Unexamined habits like this are how we end up talking past people without realizing it.

None of this requires guessing. The feedback loop is already here. If a microbusiness like Lunalimón can do it, publications can do it too.

We’ve had powerful visibility into audience behavior for well over a decade. Useful analytics are built directly into platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, and Kit. Beyond that, there’s a mature ecosystem: privacy-first tools like Umami, Plausible, and Matomo; enterprise systems like Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics; real-time monitoring tools like Chartbeat and Parsely. We can see who opens, who clicks, who stays, who bounces, who converts — and who never will.

I’ve seen firsthand how an obsession with raw pageviews in commercial media can be destructive. But I’ve also seen the opposite: a willful resistance to audience data in nonprofit newsrooms. Pretending the information doesn’t exist doesn’t preserve purity or a “unique brand” of storytelling. It just pushes tradeoffs underground, where they’re harder to examine and easier to deny. Neither posture is serious.

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This tension isn’t theoretical. It’s shaping who is willing to fund journalism at all.

Craig Newmark recently told The Chronicle of Philanthropy that he’s pulling back from supporting journalism. When Nieman Lab followed up, he challenged journalists and funders alike: “Do the organizations have real plans to grow their audiences outside of their most faithful followers?”

It’s one of the most refreshing things I’ve heard from a journalism funder in a long time — especially because it names the issue directly. Newmark isn’t questioning values. He’s questioning whether organizations are willing to make choices that actually expand their reach.

Working on Lunalimón is teaching me other lessons I’ll write about soon: how the web increasingly acts as glue between platforms rather than the center of gravity itself; how simple, privacy-first analytics can reduce reliance on Big Tech tracking without abandoning the audiences we need to reach; how multilingual digital communication is clearly the future, even as production tools struggle to catch up.

But the first lesson is simpler — and harder.

You don’t get to serve everyone. You never did. What’s different now is that this reality is visible: We can see who stays and who leaves, and investigate why. We can no longer pretend those outcomes are accidental. Not engaging with these questions doesn’t protect journalism’s soul. Building something successful and sustainable means choosing an audience, testing those choices in the open, and living with the discomfort that comes from being explicit about who you’re for and who you’re not.