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“If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will.”
By Ben Smith
Religious-sounding language will be everywhere in 2025
“A great deal of language that looks a lot like Christian Nationalism isn’t actually calling for theocracy; it is secular minoritarianism pushed by secular people, often linked to rightwing cable and other media with zero meaningful ties to the church or theological principle.”
By Whitney Phillips
Newsroom planning goes silo-free
“The key is inviting everyone who touches a story from beginning to end to be a part of the conversation.”
By Kendall Trammell
You’ll need to care more about your value chain
“Going into 2025, we need an industry-wide assessment of how our value chain functions because technical and regulatory forces will conspire to make our strategic position less defensible.”
By Sam Guzik
Play with AI like your career depends on it (it does)
“If you are a journalist or a journalism student, you should play with it, a lot, while it’s still open and cheap.”
By Marie Gilot
Your Audience team is now your Creator team
“The standalone Audience team/department/function, as we know it, is dead.”
By Ryan Kellett
Sports journalists break away from access-based journalism
“2025 will be the year when sports journalists start to really reckon with the fact that teams and players don’t need them anymore.”
By Brian Moritz
The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy
“The gap between mainstream media readers, people who get most of their news through influencers or partisan social media, and people who barely think about news at all will create a fundamental schism in how Americans see the world.”
By Alice Marwick
Meet the new metrics, same as the old metrics
“It won’t be long before AI is used to generate new metrics and new analysis, and to push user behavior further away from curated editorial experiences.”
By Margarita Noriega
There’s now a way for journalists to verify their Bluesky accounts through their employers (while still keeping control of them)
It may be too late for @edwardrmurrow.cbsnews.com, @huntersthompson.rollingstone.com, or @mikewallace.60minutes.com, but today’s reporters have another way to prove who they are on the rapidly growing social network.
By Joshua Benton
Tuning out TV news might be behind the decline in media trust. (No, really!)
But: “Does falling trust cause people to change their media use, or do changing media habits cause lower trust?”
By Sarah Scire
News outlets push vertical video to the homepage
“It’s a much better experience if you’re not turning your phone. And people don’t turn their phones.”
By Hanaa' Tameez
Core copyright violation claim moves ahead in The Intercept’s lawsuit against OpenAI
The ruling comes after a judge dismissed similar claims filed by Raw Story and AlterNet earlier this month.
By Andrew Deck
Are Americans’ perceptions of the economy and crime broken?
This election cycle showed that our evaluations of external reality are increasingly partisan. Can the media bridge the gap?
By Joshua Benton
Remember Nuzzel? A similar news-aggregating tool now exists for Bluesky
The creator of Sill says “the death of the link” has had disastrous consequences for journalism, art, and the web. His free social media tool entered public beta on Friday.
By Sarah Scire
There’s now a way for journalists to verify their Bluesky accounts through their employers (while still keeping control of them)
It may be too late for @edwardrmurrow.cbsnews.com, @huntersthompson.rollingstone.com, or @mikewallace.60minutes.com, but today’s reporters have another way to prove who they are on the rapidly growing social network.
By Joshua Benton
Tuning out TV news might be behind the decline in media trust. (No, really!)
But: “Does falling trust cause people to change their media use, or do changing media habits cause lower trust?”
News outlets push vertical video to the homepage
“It’s a much better experience if you’re not turning your phone. And people don’t turn their phones.”
What We’re Reading
The New York Times / Daisuke Wakabayashi and Su-Hyun Lee
Martial law didn’t silence South Korea’s news outlets. It empowered them.
“But when faced with censorship by the military, the Korean press did not acquiesce. News organizations spanning the political spectrum — even right-leaning publications more aligned with Mr. Yoon’s conservative People Power Party — stood united in criticism of his actions and any efforts to limit a free press.”
LinkedIn / Aditi Mukund
What Election Day taught the Chicago Sun-Times about its audience
“Our school board voter guide was an effective tool for recirculation and conversions, with readers navigating to candidate questionnaires and our general voter guide afterward. In addition to community outreach, the guide was designed with search audiences in mind, targeting candidate names and school board districts. Between Sept. 1 and Nov. 6, it was the primary entry point for readers who donated.”
Wired / Andy Greenberg
He got banned from Twitter. Now he wants to help you escape, too
“Now, [Micah] Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, he launched Cyd — an acronym for ‘Claw back Your Data’ — a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archiving it, trimming it to their preferences, or destroying it altogether.”
Variety / Todd Spangler
Joe Rogan once again had the No. 1 podcast on Spotify this year
“Rounding out the top 10 were: This Past Weekend with Theo Von (on which Trump also made an appearance); Crime Junkie; the New York Times’ The Daily; The Tucker Carlson Show; Huberman Lab; Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard; Smosh Reads Reddit Stories; and the Shawn Ryan Show.”
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Gretel Kahn
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac wrote a book on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Here’s what they think happens next for journalism there
“The real test for Bluesky will happen now, when you start to see it becomes a mainstream platform and a place where my mom or dad might congregate.”
The Verge / Sarah Jeong
What it’s like to cover the South Korean declaration of martial law while “fairly drunk” (er, “completely blasted”)
“I pace inside my Airbnb, running through a list of potential freelancers I can commission to write about what’s happening in Korea, but no one is available. I do not report on Korean politics, nor do I have enough language proficiency to interview people on the street. Also, I am completely blasted, though maybe not unusually so in Seoul on a weeknight.”
The Guardian / Julie Posetti
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the threat to press freedom
“Journalists in the U.S. — a country long at the forefront of global press freedom advocacy — now find themselves facing threats more familiar to their colleagues in the Philippines, Hungary or Venezuela. And it is from journalists in such countries that the US press must now learn how to defend press freedom and fight for facts.”
The Wall Street Journal / Drew FitzGerald
Giving up on the media business has been excellent for AT&T’s stock price
“Shares of the telecommunications giant have rebounded — including a 35% gain so far this year — since Chief Executive Officer John Stankey reversed course and spun off its Warner Bros. unit and unloaded satellite company DirecTV. On Tuesday, Stankey and his team will outline new long-term financial goals powered by its wireless and broadband services as it works to wind down its legacy landlines.”
Threads / Ashley Carman
Bloomberg is offering a paid subscription to a bundle of its tech newsletters
For $12 a month, it includes Tech Daily, Power On, Game On, Q&Al, and Soundbite, plus access to all Bloomberg articles linked in those newsletters.
Business Insider / Peter Kafka
BuzzFeed could be on the hook for $124 million this week. Does it have a plan?
“Earlier this year, BuzzFeed was shopping First We Feast — its business that owns ‘Hot Ones,’ the viral hot-chicken-wing interview show (Yup! I just typed that!) — for a reported $70 million. In September, Bloomberg reported that BuzzFeed was in talks with Netflix about some kind of deal. I’ve asked Netflix for an update on those chats, which it has never publicly acknowledged.”
Nieman Lab is a project to try to help figure out where the news is headed in the Internet age. Sign up for The Digest, our daily email with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.