The year we stop taking sides

“Like many concepts that have outlived their usefulness, the wall between business and news was taken to absurd limits, creating a culture of divisiveness that lingers on today.”

This is more of a plea than a prediction.

tim-griggsAt one point in my career, as I laid off another round of journalists as the editor of a regional newspaper in North Carolina, I had an epiphany. I had to help, or at least try my damnedest, to keep journalism alive rather than being a journalist myself. So I made the seemingly too-rare leap to the “business side.”

Flash forward a few years, when a senior colleague — who I otherwise admire greatly — told me the most important thing an editor can do is “keep the lawnmower out of the rose bushes” — a reference to fending off the evil “business side” from doing god-knows-what damage to the newsroom.

Ugh.

In 2017, I hope our industry — or at least more of it — kills the damning cultural vestige of church vs. state. Let’s start by abandoning references to “sides.”

Like many concepts that have outlived their usefulness, the wall between business and news — intended to keep advertisers’ interests from influencing news coverage decisions — was taken to absurd limits, creating a culture of divisiveness that lingers on today. And the division of labor between the two, while efficient in the monopolistic era of print, now incapacitates many news organizations that are trying to figure out how to handle necessarily blurry roles. Where should audience growth responsibility live — with the newsroom or the business? What about product? Technology? Analytics? Testing? Design? User experience?

This isn’t about org charts and reporting lines. And it’s not, for the love of god, about merging the editor and publisher jobs to cut costs. The “side” thing is much more real and tangible and destructive. It’s about how we behave, how we work together, how we tackle shared problems. It’s about how we see journalism as a greater good and, yes, how we do everything we can — appropriately, responsibly — to make money. It’s about teamwork. The term “sides,” on the other hand, implies opposition, like armies or tennis players.

When folks with P&L responsibility — publishers, GMs, marketers, sales reps, finance leaders — refuse to work collaboratively with their newsroom colleagues, we lose. When journalists refuse to understand the basic economics of the business — or play an active role in contributing to those economics — we lose.

Some startups of late aim to be built differently. And some initiatives at “legacy” news organizations preach this, too.

So, that’s my plea for 2017: Let’s lose the ego and the control and the “that’s-not-my-job” mentality. Let’s burn down the artificial divide between people who make money and people who spend it. Let’s be one, united in our pursuit of important, community- or world-changing journalism and smart, effective business practices to support it.

But I’ll settle for a baby step: No more “sides.”

Tim Griggs is an independent media consultant and advisor and former publisher of The Texas Tribune.

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

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

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Trushar Barot   API or die

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

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

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

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

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

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

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

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

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

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

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

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

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

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too