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.
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Amie Ferris-Rotman More female reporters abroad (please)
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Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity
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Matt Boggie The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea
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Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
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Jim Brady With the people, not just of the people
Lam Thuy Vo Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest
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Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
Sally Lehrman Trust comes first
Pete Brown Push alerts, personalized
Jamie Mottram From pageviews to t-shirts
Mi-Ai Parrish Blockchain and trust
Pia Frey Address users as individuals
Evie Nagy Pivot to mobile video frustration
Mary Walter-Brown Show a little vulnerability
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Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
Andrew Haeg The year journalists become relationship builders
Rick Berke Value is the watchword
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
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Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
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Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
S. Mitra Kalita The arc of news and audience
Sam Ford The year of investing in processes
Emily Goligoski Looking beyond news for inspiration
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Caitlin Thompson Podcasting models mature and diversify
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
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Marie Gilot No assholes allowed
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Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Richard Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Seeking trust in fragmented spaces
Matt DeRienzo A recession, then a collapse
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split
Amy Webb Listen to weak signals
Aron Pilhofer We can’t leave the business to the business side any more
Mariana Moura Santos Think local, act global
Mandy Velez texting is lit rn, fam
Gordon Crovitz Serving readers over advertisers
Tracie Powell The muting of underserved voices
Ray Soto VR reaches the next level
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
Kim Fox Audience teams diversify their approach
Dan Shanoff You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)
Jassim Ahmad Thriving on change
Charo Henríquez Training is an investment, not an expense
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
Kristen Muller The year of the voter
Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
Errin Haines At the ballot, it’s time to count black women
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Emma Carew Grovum Newsroom culture becomes a priority
Imaeyen Ibanga Longform video leads the way
Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
Basile Simon We need better career paths for news nerds
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
Rodney Benson Better, less read, and less trusted
Corey Johnson The pro-fact resistance
Frédéric Filloux External forces
Tim Carmody Watch out for Spotify
Cindy Royal Your journalism curriculum is obsolete
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
Mary Meehan Real lives are at stake in rural areas
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Molly de Aguiar Good journalism won’t be enough
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
Justin Kosslyn The year journalists become digital security experts
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
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Doris Truong Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes
Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Juleyka Lantigua Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
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José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
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Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
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Kathleen McElroy Building a news video experience native to mobile
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Sara M. Watson Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters
Monique Judge Letting black women tell their own stories