[t-3]

TFA suggests that the vast majority of UN reports are being downloaded less than 5000 times, and even assuming 1:1 download:read ratio, journalists and reporters are unlikely to be reading them and passing along the contents to you. Whether or not this is a problem is another matter; I took a quick skim through the first few pages of report listings in the UN digital library (https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Reports&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN stuff.

[roughly]

The point of a report is to provide a structured process and background for a set of technical or policy recommendations. It’d be perfectly normal for a report drafted by the efforts of 50 people to have an audience of 2-3 major decision makers - the point is the process for generating the recommendations. Further, it’d also be quite normal for a report on a specific topic to be used as an input to another process which generates its own outputs, meaning there’s little reason for people not involved in the latter process to read the original report unless they’re deeply interrogating the findings of the consolidated report.

[stdbrouw]

Even so. I read a lot of reports about educational policy (and occasionally produce them) and even if there are only 2-3 major decision makers you'd expect the report to be read by various cabinet members of those decision makers, by committee members in parliament, by academics, by other teams or colleagues or institutions that would have liked to write the report in your stead or that produce "competing" reports, by folks at think tanks, and by journalists and politicians in general. Because the executive summary is almost always inlined in these kinds of reports, the intended audience is generally quite broad. I'm not saying that attaining only a couple hundred downloads of a report necessarily show that money was wasted on superfluous research, but it definitely can be an indicator of waste.

I think this is one of those things where you can really overthink it and convince yourself that "the report was read only once, by the one person who had to read it" is an ideal outcome, but really it isn't.

[watwut]

I would not expect journalists to regularly download them and read them without specific reason. I would expect them to be read when someone is actually dealing with the issue at hands and needs the details from an authority.

Like, if something like "Report of the Secretary-General on the staff of the United Nations Secretariat" has 5000 readers, it is 4995 more then I would expect. That is a real report I just pulled from their database. I did not bothered to read it.