Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

“Journalism is punch-drunk and staggering, convinced that still being on its feet is the same as putting up a fight.”

I want everyone to be proud of me that I didn’t begin this with a string of epithets and pejoratives.

I don’t want to be eloquent and visionary. I want to be direct. So I’m gonna use boxing and the Dungeon Family.

We are losing a slugfest that we don’t have to, because we spent so much time trying to separate from the people and communities we write for that we keep trying to have a “dialogue” in the middle of Round 4.

We are in a fight and, frankly, we’re probably gonna lose. Our inability to clearly and openly discuss the reality of the moment and the history of the practice, development, and power of journalism left us open. They hit journalism with everything they had, every chance they had.

From “fake news” being decontextualized from propaganda, to objectivity becoming an excuse for a complete dereliction of duty. Rather than asking questions, naked careerism and “access” made our storied profession a game.

Clicks and constantly moving (and often ultimately unimportant) metrics had millions of dollars chasing technology goals that were ultimately inaccessible to most of our audience.

The people in our corner. The people who told us again and again they wanted to be heard. Who supported hyperlocal news while windmilling legacy papers sacrificed credibility over and over.

Non-diverse, complacent newsrooms have codes for behavior on social media that silence the marginalized, but they can’t recognize the conflict of interest that social contact with millionaire-financed right-wingers creates.

And they had the nerve to demand they be respected while reporting on a trick many audiences had seen years ago.

Journalism is punch-drunk and staggering, convinced that still being on its feet is the same as putting up a fight. As audiences, experts, academics, and our constantly shifting platforms desperately try to stem the blood flowing from the open cut over our eyes.

Go listen to “Watch for the Hook (Dungeon Family Remix)” by Cool Breeze. From picking up our pencils, to actively realizing the danger we are in, ATL’s Dungeon Family has laid a template for what we need to do next.

Whether we listen to it or not is up to us, but we are shook, and whether we come back is dependent on us realizing we need the perspectives that see danger before we do while they still care to tell us.

Better listen to our corner. Because the bell for Round 5 just rung. Ding ding.

Sydette Harry is editor-at-large of The Coral Project and an editor at the Mozilla Foundation.

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Dan Shanoff   You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Helen Havlak   Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Susie Banikarim   R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Paul Ford   Go global

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Tanzina Vega   It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Eric Ulken   The year local publishers get smart(er) about change

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Jake Levine   The return to now

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Aron Pilhofer   We can’t leave the business to the business side any more

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Sara M. Watson   Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Burt Herman   Things get real

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Julia B. Chan   Looking for loyalty in all the right places

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Errin Haines   At the ballot, it’s time to count black women

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Alan Soon   The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg   (Hint: It’s about your brand)

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy   Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism

Jim Moroney   Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Jesse Holcomb   Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)