Three factors will reshape journalism in 2019: the pressing need for ad-supported publishers to find new revenue streams, the unusual effects of looking at reader engagement through the lens of subscriptions, and the question of where the news habit that Facebook created in a new generation of news readers will end up taking them next.
The imperative to diversify revenue
Do you want dine with the Times and shop with the Guardian? Wear the New Yorker and chat with the Telegraph? All this and more will be possible in 2019, as publisher business models undergo a radical transformation. Conventional subscriptions and memberships and loyalty programs will abound and develop, but for the vast majority of readers in countries such as the U.K., Canada and Germany, journalism’s irresistible price point of zero will prove hard to shift.
This will drive publishers into events businesses, e-commerce, consulting, and other areas as publishers have their portal moment, leveraging reach and trust to move sideways into businesses never envisioned — and, in doing so, hopefully finding significant new streams of cash. Whether they re-invest it into a core product or use it to develop whole new businesses will be the mark of real innovation, but the overall effect will be a positive step towards sustainability.
Subscriptions
The continued shift to subscriptions and the flight-to-quality it represents will be aided ably by the same platforms that shaped the digital advertising industry, whose most cynical leaders perhaps see it as an opportunity to deflate competition from publishers for ad dollars. For traditional publishers who had an under-leveraged older audience with disposable income the path to reader revenue is relatively straightforward in places like the U.S. and the Nordics. But for challenger brands created in the disruption of the past 15 years of platform publishing with younger (and therefore, thanks to the global recession, often relatively lower income) readers the way forward is less clear. Many of these brands have already come unstuck struggling under the expectations of venture capital, falling prey to the dangerous Silicon Valley delusion of inexorable hockey stick growth.
The reality for most media business models will be far more mundane. Will younger audiences in 2019 apply the pricing approaches of cord-cutting to journalism and write off a trendy news subscription in the same part of their monthly budgets as Netflix? Or will the deep commoditization of news mean there is always someone to fulfill that news need for free? For the good of journalism overall, 2019 will need to see conscious efforts to address underserved audiences unwilling or unable to pay for news and avoid losing the platform era’s tendency to shape coverage that reflects audiences’ real wants and needs.
The Facebook refugees
At the time we called it a Facebook habit, but looking back was it actually a news habit in a Facebook wrapper? Since Facebook pulled journalism out of the newsfeed over the past year, users have just shifted their news routine elsewhere on their smartphones, with the main beneficiaries human-edited platforms such as Apple News, Upday and Flipboard.
Human editors sound like a good thing, but next year we’ll see whether they’re really better than algorithms at all things, with unscalable humans manning closed platforms pitted against technology’s power to personalize and prioritize and the basic openness of the last generation of platforms.
In 2019, the media’s insistence on biting the hand that feeds it will drive it to examine the new biases and shortcomings of the new gatekeepers of attention. We may end up uneasy with what we find.
Jack Riley is the international strategy director at HuffPost.
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Joshua Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Juleyka Lantigua-Williams Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
james Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater