Who are your users?: Comparing media professionals’ preconception of users to data-driven personas

One of the reasons for using personas is to align user understandings across project teams and sites. As part of a larger persona study, at Al Jazeera English (AJE), we conducted 16 qualitative interviews with media producers, the end users of persona descriptions. We asked the participants about their understanding of a typical AJE media consumer, and the variety of answers shows that the understandings are not aligned and are built on a mix of own experiences, own self, assumptions, and data given by the company. The answers are sometimes aligned with the data-driven personas and sometimes not. The end users are divided in two groups: news producers who have little interest in having data-based insights of news consumers and producers for social media platforms who have more interest in this information.