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