As an industry reckoning with challenges on multiple fronts, 2018 is the year when news organizations leverage partnerships and collaboration with other news organizations — not to mention a wide range of partners like tech companies, nonprofits, community organizations, and academia — to address challenges.
As a toolset, collaboration is a flexible set of operations that newsrooms can adopt in order to more strategically use limited resources, reduce competitive waste, counter misinformation, ameliorate a lack of diversity, expand reach in audience and sources, connect with communities, cross lines of division, and cover news in community-centered rather than transactional ways.
This is the year when we develop the infrastructure, protocols, and processes to support and facilitate effective collaboration where and when it’s needed, quickly and effectively initiated.
Journalism has much to learn from other industries in this regard. In the same way that the CDC doesn’t wait for an emergency to have a system in place for coordinating area health centers, so too should journalism create protocols for covering large-scale stories, disasters, emergencies, shootings, and other significant events to best leverage the roles and expertise of different relevant news organizations best situated to cover the story.
The coming year will see more organization develop around projects in the vein of Documenting Hate and the Panama and Paradise Papers, where we collectively support and empower networks of local newsrooms to cover large, distributed stories effectively and comprehensively. We’ll leverage infrastructure to make spontaneous collaboration in the face of sudden news more efficient and calibrated. We’ll see more interconnectedness between local newsrooms and community partners, in the spirit of City Bureau, to best reach more cross-sections of communities and provide more nuanced and community-focused journalism.
Whether the scale is global or local, the infrastructure of collaboration, both human and technical, will be both a need and an opportunity. We need to create and foster the relationships that will ensure our newsrooms can address problems that need to be fixed and do the journalism that needs to be done.
This opportunity is our chance to rethink what it looks like to create news in a world where the traditional notions of competition no longer serve the best interests of journalism or our audiences.
We can do better and we can do it together.
Heather Bryant is the founder of Project Facet, an open source project to support editorial collaboration.
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Seeking trust in fragmented spaces
Matt Carlson Attacks on the press will get worse
Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
Carlos Martínez de la Serna The new journalism commons
Kyle Ellis Let’s build our way out of this
Cindy Royal Your journalism curriculum is obsolete
Dannagal G. Young Stop covering politics as a game
Mary Meehan Real lives are at stake in rural areas
Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Cristina Wilson The year of the Instagram Story
Joyce Barnathan It will be harder to bury the news
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
Dan Shanoff You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)
Christopher Meighan Passive partnership is in the rearview
Kathleen McElroy Building a news video experience native to mobile
Joanne Lipman Journalists inventing revenue streams
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split
Mary Walter-Brown Show a little vulnerability
Felix Salmon Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin
Jacqui Cheng Retailers move into content
Sally Lehrman Trust comes first
Tamar Charney We get serious about algorithms
Cory Haik Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact
Sam Ford The year of investing in processes
Michelle Ferrier The year of the great reckoning
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
Dheerja Kaur Fun with subscription products
Debra Adams Simmons And a woman shall lead them
Rodney Benson Better, less read, and less trusted
Borja Echevarría TV goes digital, digital goes TV
Monika Bauerlein The firehose of falsehood
Jarrod Dicker Honesty in advertising
Julia Beizer A longer view on the pivot
Lanre Akinola Making noise is not a strategy
Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
Tanya Cordrey Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention
Matt DeRienzo A recession, then a collapse
Mariano Blejman News games rule
Luke O'Neil The end is already here
Rick Berke Value is the watchword
Sara M. Watson Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters
Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
Adam Thomas Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor
Heather Bryant Building the ecosystems for collaboration
Elizabeth Jensen Show your work
Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
Kristen Muller The year of the voter
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
Jim Moroney Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for
Juleyka Lantigua Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
Ray Soto VR reaches the next level
Rachel Davis Mersey AI, with real smarts
Hannah Cassius The year of the echo-chamber escapists
C.W. Anderson The social media apocalypse
Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg (Hint: It’s about your brand)
Tim Carmody Watch out for Spotify
Alastair Coote The year of self-improvement
Richard Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
S. Mitra Kalita The arc of news and audience
Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
David Skok Finding an information-life balance
Evie Nagy Pivot to mobile video frustration
Justin Kosslyn The year journalists become digital security experts
Jassim Ahmad Thriving on change
Emma Carew Grovum Newsroom culture becomes a priority
Imaeyen Ibanga Longform video leads the way
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
Tracie Powell The muting of underserved voices
Nicholas Quah Stop talking trash about young people
Yvonne Leow The rise of video messaging
Nikki Usher The year of The Washington Post
Feli Sánchez The year for guerrilla user research
Tanzina Vega It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic
Amie Ferris-Rotman More female reporters abroad (please)
Craig Newmark Working together toward sustainable solutions
Rubina Madan Fillion Unlocking the potential of AI
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
Trushar Barot The Jio-fication of India
Renée Kaplan The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)
Daniel Trielli The rich get richer, the poor scramble
Aron Pilhofer We can’t leave the business to the business side any more
Kawandeep Virdee Zines had it right all along
Manoush Zomorodi Self-help as a publishing strategy
Emily Goligoski Looking beyond news for inspiration
José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
Jesse Holcomb Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you
Marie Gilot No assholes allowed
Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
Lucas Graves From algorithms to institutions
Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism
Matt Boggie The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea
Kim Fox Audience teams diversify their approach
Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Publishing less to give readers more
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer Skepticism and narcissism
Errin Haines At the ballot, it’s time to count black women
Rachel Schallom Better design helps differentiate opinion and news
Jessica Parker Gilbert Design connects storytelling and strategy
Molly de Aguiar Good journalism won’t be enough
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
Corey Ford The empire strikes back
Federica Cherubini The rise of bridge roles in news organizations
Pete Brown Push alerts, personalized
Rodney Gibbs Tech workers turn to journalism
Laura E. Davis Writing answers before you know the question
Joanne McNeil Gatekeeping the gatekeepers
Will Sommer The year local media gets conservative
Amy Webb Listen to weak signals
Alice Antheaume Are you fluent in AI?
Jamie Mottram From pageviews to t-shirts
Nushin Rashidian Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives
Michael Kuntz The only pivot that might work
Francesco Marconi The year of machine-to-machine journalism
Helen Havlak Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds
Umbreen Bhatti The trust problem isn’t new
Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
P. Kim Bui The reckoning is only beginning
Nicholas Diakopoulos Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity
Andrew Ramsammy The year ownership mattered
Eric Nuzum Beyond the narrative arc
Pablo Boczkowski The rise of skeptical reading
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
Mario García Storytelling finally adapts to mobile
Andrew Haeg The year journalists become relationship builders
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms
AX Mina Memes and visuals come to the fore
Kinsey Wilson Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up
Corey Johnson The pro-fact resistance
Caitlin Thompson Podcasting models mature and diversify
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Doris Truong Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes
Pia Frey Address users as individuals
Julia B. Chan Looking for loyalty in all the right places
Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
Mira Lowe The year of the local watchdog
Mi-Ai Parrish Blockchain and trust
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Amy King Let’s amplify visual voice
Mariana Moura Santos Think local, act global
Mandy Velez texting is lit rn, fam
Sydette Harry Listen to your corner and watch for the hook
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
Monique Judge Letting black women tell their own stories
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
Jim Brady With the people, not just of the people
Basile Simon We need better career paths for news nerds
Raju Narisetti Mirror, mirror on the wall
Susie Banikarim R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)
Charo Henríquez Training is an investment, not an expense
Hossein Derakhshan Television has won
Niketa Patel Live journalism comes of age
Lam Thuy Vo Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest
Zizi Papacharissi Women come back