The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

“If 2017 reached peak innovation strategizing, pivoting, and iterating, then 2018 may very well be the year of pause, pare back, and hyper-focus.”

My prediction is that 2018 will be the year of quiet adjustments.

Sound uninspiring…or, actually, manageable and focused? Worrisomely workaday…or maybe a strategy for planning ahead for a news ecosystem in which continual change is business as usual?

If 2016 was sobering — a double-digit drop in print ad revenues, peak anti-platform sentiment, the migration of the large majority of digital ad revenue to Google and Facebook, among other disruptions — then 2017 was arguably chastening. The pivot to video peaked and crashed. VC-fueled digital pure-players lost their luster, missing revenue targets, and following up with layoffs (BuzzFeed, Mashable). The year of Trump, Brexit, and growing populism all across Europe has — this is a reductive shortcut, but all those were driving external factors — forced a turning point on the platforms, which have started evolving, grudgingly, into institutions with social accountability, even as more people that ever before are consuming their news on platforms. The fake news phenomenon has transformed the very identity of news media and their role as trustworthy gatekeepers that had been taken for granted. Those are just a few of this past year’s disruptions.

But because of (or despite) all that, the past few years in the news media ecosystem have also been a flurry of often radical innovation in newsrooms. Powered by results-driven methodologies, full of experiments and outcomes and metrics, it has been transformative. But it has also been exhausting and, for some newsrooms, exhaustive. They may be reaching the natural end of an intense cycle of constant testing-and-learning, even as newsroom restructuring continues. The New York Times just announced its second reorganization in as many years of their audience team, The Washington Post this past summer announced a series of new digital strategy and editorial innovation roles, and here at the Financial Times, we are creating a new newsroom team, led by my colleague Robin Kwong, head of digital delivery, that is defining new digital strategy roles. If this is the start of a new cycle of innovation, what comes next?

It may be that 2018 will be…chill.

I’m kidding. But not entirely. If 2017 reached peak innovation strategizing, pivoting, and iterating, then 2018 may very well be the year of pause, pare back, and hyper-focus. It is a year that could look something like this in newsrooms:

Let’s get really good at the engagement strategies that we now know work.

Let’s try to talk about innovation (always? Only ever?) coupled with sustainability: This thing that we wan to try — what is the lasting change it could bring about? For whom? And what is its value to that audience?

Let’s reassure audiences and not wow them or blow them away — or let’s make the former the priority and the latter the really-nice-to-have. It’s not the end of delight, but let’s focus on sustainable satisfaction.

Let’s prove our value to audiences in everything we do. In other words, let’s make everything we do something worth paying for.

Let’s give away less journalism for free (fewer clicks on Google, less free stuff on social), but let’s offer more ways to pay for it — not just onsite, but offsite — and with a greater variety of products. Maybe not all audiences should be paying the same amount for the same product, or be offered the same products. Let’s anticipate their willingness to pay and offer personalized pricing to go with personalized content.

Let’s change the subject from fake news and trust, and let’s start talking instead about strategies to anticipate our audience’s needs, using AI to understand their habits and preferences even better than they themselves consciously do. Let’s help them understand what they find most useful in what we offer and develop more efficient ways to help them find it.

Let’s ask audiences to tell us what they think, and let’s remember to let them know that we actually listened.

All of which quietly builds trust and loyalty, without asking for it. Quiet revolutions are sometimes the most radical.

Renée Kaplan is head of audience engagement at the Financial Times.

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Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

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Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

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Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

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Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

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Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

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Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

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Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

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Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

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

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

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

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

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Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

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Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

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

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

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Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

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

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Jake Levine   The return to now

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

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Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

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

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Dan Newman   A return to trust

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

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

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Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

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Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

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

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

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

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Paul Ford   Go global

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

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Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

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

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

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Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

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Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

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Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

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Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

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Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

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Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

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Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

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Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

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Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

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Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

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Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

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John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify