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