Audio-First Newsrooms Still Have Web Problems

Eight million people across platforms, €12 million in revenue, and no traditional news site. That is Be Water, the Italian media company building an audio and video-first audience while most legacy outlets are still arguing about print versus digital. A recent Reuters Institute piece on Be Water is worth reading, but I want to push back on one thing the coverage implies: that ditching the website is the lesson.

It is not.

The lesson is that content and infrastructure are different problems. Be Water solved the content problem by going where young audiences already were. But the infrastructure problem does not disappear just because your content lives on Spotify, Instagram, or YouTube. It gets harder. And for most newsrooms I work with, especially community and immigrant-serving outlets, underestimating that is an expensive mistake.

Your platform audience is not your audience

When your content lives on third-party platforms, the platform owns the relationship. You get impressions, plays, follower counts. What you do not get is an email address, a payment method, or any continuity if the algorithm shifts or the platform changes its terms. That is not a hypothetical. It has happened to newsrooms that built entirely on Facebook, on Twitter, on Apple News. The pattern is consistent.

Audio and video content is a great top-of-funnel. It reaches people who would never navigate to a news site on their own. But at some point, the newsroom needs to convert that reach into something it actually owns. That conversion happens on the web. It happens on a landing page, a membership form, a newsletter signup. None of that works if the web presence is an afterthought.

I see this with outlets doing genuinely good journalism. Strong podcast numbers, real community trust, and then a website that makes it nearly impossible to subscribe, donate, or even figure out what the outlet does. The audience exists. The infrastructure to capture it does not.

What the website is actually for

If your primary content is audio or video, your website is not a content hub. Stop treating it like one. A site that tries to mirror your podcast feed and your Instagram grid and your newsletter archive is not doing any of those things well.

A website for an audio or video-first newsroom has three jobs. First, it converts. Someone hears your podcast, looks you up, and lands on your site. That visit should end with an email address or a membership. Everything on the page should support that outcome. Second, it archives. Your episode from two years ago is still findable via search. A listener wants to share it with someone who does not use the same podcast app. The web is where that link lives. Third, it establishes legitimacy. Foundations, institutional partners, and major donors will look you up. A broken or skeletal site signals that you have not thought seriously about your own infrastructure. That impression matters.

None of those jobs require a traditional news site with a homepage full of headlines. They require a site that is intentional about what it is there to do.

Community media has extra stakes here

The Be Water example is instructive partly because it is Italian and partly because their audience skews young but is not otherwise navigating language or access barriers. For outlets serving immigrant communities, the infrastructure stakes are higher.

An outlet like El Tímpano reaches audiences who consume news through WhatsApp, through radio, through text. That is not a problem to solve. That is an audience doing exactly what makes sense for them. But the web still has to work for the moments when it matters: when someone needs to find a resource the outlet covered, when a community member wants to share a piece with a case worker or a teacher, when a reader in a different city wants to support the outlet financially.

Those are web problems. Being audio-first or WhatsApp-first does not make them go away. It just means they are easier to ignore until they cost you something real.

The question worth asking now

If someone finds your outlet today through a platform they already use, what happens next? Can they subscribe to your newsletter from their phone in under thirty seconds? Can they become a member without creating an account first? Can they find that episode or video they half-remember from six months ago?

If the answer to any of those is no or uncertain, that is a web problem. The format of your content does not change that. It just changes which parts of the site matter most and which parts you can stop worrying about.

Going audio or video-first is a legitimate editorial and audience strategy. But the infrastructure has to follow the strategy, not lag behind it. Most newsrooms I talk to have figured out the content side faster than the web side. That gap is where readers fall through.