Next year will be a bit of a throwback to 2009 in that Google will be a focus for lots of news publishers. It will also remind us of 2007 as we spend time on homepages, have a touch of 2008 as we reassess app offerings, and be a rerun of 2010 and 2011 in the attention we give to aggregators.
Why all the flashbacks?
Google’s importance has grown as publishers have dialed down their focus on Facebook following the algorithm change announcement of January 2018 (though Facebook still drives 24 percent of traffic to publishers, according to data collected by analytics platform Parsely). But while 10 years ago it was a pure desktop search story, heading into 2019 we now pay attention to Google AMP, Google Content Suggestions, and Google Discover.
Homepages, apps, and the kind of destination journalism and product experiences that drive readers to go directly to a site on mobile are crucial in 2019. While the past couple of years have been trying for Facebook-oriented publishers (think Mic, Mashable, Vice, UniLad), the following three facts demonstrate the need for us to focus on driving direct relationships with readers on mobile homepages and apps.
Mobile homepage visitors spend 40 percent more time actively engaging than their desktop counterparts (22 engaged seconds vs. 16 on desktop), Chartbeat reported in June.
How a reader chooses to spend her time on her phone is our only true competitor.
What happened during a 45-minute Facebook outage in August? Direct traffic to publishers’ websites increased 11 percent, while traffic to publishers’ mobile apps soared 22 percent.
What happened when there was an hourlong YouTube outage in October? Publishers had a 20 percent net increase in traffic. Just over half of this increase went to general articles on publisher sites, while articles about the outage comprised a 9 percent lift.
So when a reader can’t access a social network, or when she has satiated her appetite for Instagram, checked her Facebook groups, and cleared her other notifications, she’ll spend time going directly to a trusted news source.
Next year is when mobile will surpass TV as the medium attracting the most minutes in the U.S., according to eMarketer. U.S. adults spent an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes per day on mobile devices this year, a one-year increase of more than 11 minutes. Here in the U.K., Britons spend more than 24 hours a week on their phones.
So as time spent on mobile continues to rise, the battle is not just for the lock screen, but for readers to have our site or app front of mind when they’re thinking of how to spend the next five minutes of phone fiddling.
Sarah Marshall is head of audience growth at Vogue International.
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
james Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
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
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Juleyka Lantigua-Williams Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Joshua Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions