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