The rich get richer, the poor scramble

“The truth is, in 2018 and beyond, it’s only going to be more expensive to maintain a successful news website. That will lead to further inequality between big and small news organizations. The big will become bigger, and the ones that are smaller, well, they will have to scramble for audience.”

For the past year, we have seen flurries of reports about the successes of some traditional newspapers in the digital marketplace. The New York Times hits 3 million total subscribers! The Washington Post is actually hiring people! That is great, but the success of big players in journalism can actually hide how small players are not going to be able to keep up. The truth is, in 2018 and beyond, it’s only going to be more expensive to maintain a successful news website. That will lead to further inequality between big and small news organizations. The big will become bigger, and the ones that are smaller, well, they will have to scramble for audience.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The internet, after all, would be the domain of the long tail: those smaller websites that can still find their niche audience and be competitive, even if there are few really big players. But in 2018 and beyond, acquiring and keeping an audience is going to take more tech expertise and all-around firepower.

The Post and the Times are buoyed by their top-notch investigative journalism in the age of Trump, smart collaborations with tech, and positive brand recognition (let’s not forget the high-profile movie out this month). But aside from that, there are underlying reasons for sustained success among the big newspapers. Their economic dominance is key in a market that requires more and more advanced tools to grow and retain audience in our algorithmically-defined age.

The Post is already using predictive algorithms and data analysis to determine which stories will be more successful. The Times has announced 2018 will be the “Year of the Audience” (notice: not “the public,” not “the readers,” but “the audience”), with more specialized top-level leadership that will devote themselves to metrics and strategize how to “best compete for [the audience’s] time and attention.”

What about smaller, local newspapers? Well, first, most of them are not in D.C., covering the big, flashy beat, the Trump White House. Secondly, their smaller scale is not enough to convert into the richness of resources to make great reporting investments, design better webpages, and hire the talent that allows websites to stay on top of social media and search results.

All this adds up to the fact that smaller, less popular newsrooms have a tricky task ahead of them. And it can mean that the further concentration of news organizations is unavoidable. In this darkest timeline, the admission price of the news business is just too expensive for the little guys.

Sure, it’s great that we have journalism behemoths out there, doing their amazing work. But think of all the news that wouldn’t be covered or the perspectives that would be lost if all the smaller newsrooms went away.

Daniel Trielli is a journalist and Ph.D. student in media, technology, and society at Northwestern University.

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Burt Herman   Things get real

Paul Ford   Go global

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

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

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

L. Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

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

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

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

Richard J. Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Juleyka Lantigua-Williams   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

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

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

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

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

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

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

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

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Jake Levine   The return to now

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

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

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

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

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

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

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

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

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

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

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

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

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

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

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

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?