The last few years have been a hell of a ride for people who sit at the intersection of news and technology. We’ve expanded to new platforms. We’ve experimented with new devices. We’ve tried new storytelling concepts and found ways to leverage our communities for good.
The bigger! better! faster! more! thrill of it all is exhilarating — and gives me a lot of hope for all of the avenues for news in the brave new world. But lately, I find myself drawn back to the homefront, focused on one question:
How can I bottle our core identity as a brand and have its essence shine through all of our experiences, off-platform and on?
Voice was once solely an editorial endeavor. Decisions about what to cover and how to cover it defined a news organization’s identity. But today, what we have to say is only one part of who we are. Our consumers know us by the design choices we make, the frequency and character of our push alerts, what we do on social, how we monetize, how we market, and which technologies and platforms we choose to pursue.
These aren’t just product, distribution, or strategy decisions. Together, all of these add up to our identity, our voice in the world where our consumers find us. For too many years, these very real choices were afterthoughts in a lot of news organizations, decisions we made passively when we couldn’t resource some opportunity or another.
In 2017, let’s own these choices actively. It’s time to center ourselves on what we want our unique organizations to be and how we aim to serve our audiences. We have years of experimentation at our backs and the wisdom to know the game will keep changing. But a coherence of identity throughout all of the decisions we make will help our brands mean something in the minds of our audiences. Meaning something is the first step to being vital. And being vital is essential if we want our voices to endure.
Julia Beizer is head of product at The Huffington Post.
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Carrie Brown We won’t do enough
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
David Weigel A test for online speech
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love