Adriana Lacy delivers keynote at Sciences Po journalism school in Paris

Adriana Lacy, founder and CEO of Adriana Lacy Consulting and Field Nine Group, delivered a keynote at the Sciences Po journalism school in Paris in December 2025 on the question of what newsrooms should be measuring.

The talk, titled "Metrics, Audiences, Engagement: What's Next for Journalism?", argued that two decades of newsroom optimization have been aimed at the wrong targets. Clicks, pageviews, and follower counts climbed while trust in news fell, with roughly 40 percent of people globally saying they trust most news. Impressions do not establish credibility. Reach on its own does not produce impact or revenue.

The keynote made the case that the industry's most-cited indicators are actively misleading, and that the measures worth building around are the ones tied to whether an audience returns, pays, and believes what it reads. For a room of students entering the field, the argument carried a practical edge: the dashboards they will inherit were designed for a business model that no longer holds.

Sciences Po's journalism school trains reporters and editors from across Europe and beyond, and its programming regularly brings in practitioners working on the commercial and audience side of the industry alongside newsroom leaders.