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