As any Nieman Lab reader knows all too well, audiences have progressively sagged for most segments of the news media over the last many years. But radio bucks that trend. Over the last nine years, terrestrial radio (which of course includes formats beyond news) has held steady, and public radio’s audience actually grew over the last couple of years. That’s encouraging.
Moving from terrestrial to digital, the audience landscape is even more auspicious for audio news. Podcast adoption continues to rise (and what an embarrassment of riches we have in terms of content). On-demand services like NPR One are growing. And smart speakers are sleeping giants for news.
Currently, smart-speaker users lean hard on music, but news consumption is growing. Privacy concerns aside, consumers continue to gobble up these talking speakers, and news organizations are experimenting on them. Will this lead to bigger audio news audiences? It sure looks that way. A year ago, 4 percent of NPR’s livestreaming listeners tuned in through smart speakers; this year, it’s 19 percent. Add to that Google’s recently announced plan to launch a voice-driven version of Google News, which will make it easier to discover audio content. The upshot is smart-speaker users will likely find, share, and consume more audio news content next year.
That’s not much of a prediction, though. It’s more of an observation of emerging trends.
I think where it gets interesting is with young adult listeners. Already mobile-tethered and expecting content on demand, they’re a prime audience for this evolution of audio-based news.
It’s not just tech. Politics also fuels my prediction. Young people turned out in high numbers for the 2018 midterms. Much of that civic engagement energy evaporated after election day, but some of it will persist and manifest in new news consumption habits — namely smart, accessible audio news that’s easily discoverable and always ready on demand.
For innovative newsrooms able to invest time and resources into figuring out how to adapt audio content to these new platforms, there’s a young and perhaps sizable audience to be found.
Rodney Gibbs is chief product officer of The Texas Tribune.
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists