The year of the rebelpreneur

“An informed and connected public is the bedrock of democracy. But with our journalistic institutions under threat economically, politically, and culturally, that bedrock is cracking.”

Winter is here.

corey-fordI felt the bite of the wind most deeply when I got the email from another parent who had been on my daughter’s playground the day after that terrifying night:

The girls were standing in a circle
Comparing skin color
And deciding who was safe
And who was not.

These were first graders.
In Oakland.
On 11/9.

Day One of Trump.

I broke down. Terrified.
Was this my country now?
Nightmare. Sheer terror. Please wake me up. Wake up!
This is not my America.

But it was. I was awoken.

This is how it feels to be terrified of authorities.
To feel the machines of a totalitarian state begin to screech and turn and target you.
To look around at your fellow citizens and not know who is friend and who is foe.

This is how many of my fellow Americans who do not look like me feel every. single. day.

America, the myth. Shattered.

That woke me up.
No time to cry. No time to panic.

I was made for this moment, and so were you.

It’s the time to fight.
The time to courageously risk our privilege.
The time not just to resist, but to oppose.
Each with our own superpower from our own point of leverage.

From in front of the camera,
To the newsrooms of New York City,
To the garages of Silicon Valley.

Those who flinch will fall in disgrace. Heroes no more.

But those who stay clear eyed in their values and shout into the face of a creeping normalization of what we CANNOT let become normal — will rise.

It’s that. Or we lose everything we stand for as Americans.

An informed and connected public is the bedrock of democracy. But with our journalistic institutions under threat economically, politically, and culturally, that bedrock is cracking.

We need to strengthen our media ecosystem.

The seeds of the next great media institutions will be planted this year by courageous entrepreneurs who make the leap to build ventures that speak truth to power, close the empathy gap, and take a radically inclusive approach to amplifying the voices of all Americans.

Winter may be here but inside the fire is rekindled anew. Our purpose is clear.

This is the Year of The Rebelpreneur.

Corey Ford is managing partner of Matter.

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

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

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

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

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Trushar Barot   API or die

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

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

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

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

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

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

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

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

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

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

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

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

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media