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.

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Paul Ford   Go global

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

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

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

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

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

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

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

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Burt Herman   Things get real

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Jake Levine   The return to now

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

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

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

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

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

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

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

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

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

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

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

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

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

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

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

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

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

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

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

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

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

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

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts