The coming collaboration across Europe

“European media will develop a common vocabulary to test, measure and analyze the diversity and impact of our coverage, newsrooms, and stories.”

2017 will see the rise of a new wave of collaborative European journalism.

Europe is more divided than ever. Traditional barriers of border, language, and culture are being compounded. Isolationism spurred by economic and migration crises is defining politics at the local, national, and continental level. Populism is moving from living room conversations into the ballot box.

adam-thomasAgainst this backdrop, one of the key systems that would normally hold these people and processes accountable — journalism — is facing its own crisis. Traditional business models have been decimated. Voters are unable to understand politics, and less willing to trust a press they feel is complicit in their detachment from the decisions that affect their lives.

Collaborative European journalism is now essential on two levels. First, patterns hide in silos. We’ve seen from the U.S. elections how weak state-level data can obscure a national picture. To be able to understand and inform, European media needs to connect the dots and tell stories on a continental level.

Second, in order to achieve sustainability and impact, news organizations need to resist the temptation to retreat into their bunkers and budget sheets. Journalists need to be open their failings (and successes) in attempting to define new revenue models and forms of storytelling.

We’ve made a good start. Initiatives like the Digital News Initiative, News Impact Summits, Journalism Grants, and Hacks/Hackers are promoting innovation at the European level. Reporters are crossing borders on projects like the Panama Papers, the Climate Publishers Network, and The Migrants Files. Startups from across Europe are being scaled in fascinating places like Next Media Accelerator. Amongst public broadcasters, the EBU does invaluable work at the European level. On the commercial front, Politico Europe and Blendle are making moves with transnational news and audiences. It may not be a truly pan-European media of the type Wolfgang Blau has advocated for (saying “500 million E.U. citizens, 28 member states, and a crisis, but still no pan-European media. Are we nuts?”), but it’s a model for future growth.

In 2017, collaborative European journalism will prevail and scale. Why? Because, with over 10 national elections next year, it simply has to. With migration challenging notions of the nation state, it simply has to. With climate policy impacting our everyday lives, it simply has to.

2017 will see European news organizations working together on cross-border investigations. Journalists will share datasets and pressure European organizations to open up data platforms. Independent bodies will track and cover voting polls, patterns, and problems. European startups will migrate to the new wave of European accelerators and infect news organizations old and new with disruptive, innovative ideas. European media will develop a common vocabulary to test, measure and analyze the diversity and impact of our coverage, newsrooms, and stories.

If necessity is the mother of invention, collaboration is the father. 2017 will see the rise of a new form of European journalism based on working together to report on the issues that divide and connect our continent.

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Trushar Barot   API or die

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition