2
0
1
9

Fight the urge to run away from social media

“The bad guys — the fake-news makers, bots, trolls, and scammers — will gladly take over the community organizer roles we leave vacant. They’re pretty good at this sort of thing.”

The news industry these past few years has been a middle schooler with low self-esteem, trailing around after the popular kids at Facebook, letting them copy our homework and take our lunch money in hopes that we might have some of that success rub off on us.

As in every teen movie ever made, this plan didn’t work. Hitching one’s proverbial wagon to social and technology platforms won’t ever make up for not having a viable business model. While it’s a good idea for news companies to rethink their business strategies with the likes of Facebook — journalists shouldn’t be so quick to jump ship altogether.

I’m friends with a lot of journalists on social media — too many, probably — and I’ve seen the flood of hand-wringing posts about “Why I’m leaving X social platform.” That’s taking the easy way out.

In 2019, we have to get back to the social part of social media or risk being left out of the conversation altogether. The bad guys — the fake-news makers, bots, trolls, and scammers — will gladly take over the community organizer roles we leave vacant. They’re pretty good at this sort of thing.

(Note: I’ll be the first to admit that I am a social media apologist. I have spent more than 10 years traveling the world like Harold Hill, selling Twitter and Facebook to the masses. Today, telling people I still use Facebook is like telling them how much I still love Kanye West.)

There are lot of good reasons not to trust the platforms. There’s the disinformation, the total decimation of the digital advertising market, the selling and misuse of user data, the crazypants palace intrigue, the turning a blind eye to abuse, etc.

As journalists, we need to get over all of that. Facebook and its subsidiary tools like Instagram and WhatsApp are where billions of people still come together, which means we still have to be there too.

You may find this hard to believe, but one time, journalists joined social media to talk to the audience. There was no advertising play, no payouts to produce videos, no thirsty posts to gin up metrics to impress the shareholders — just people talking to other people in their communities. It was a beautiful time to be alive.

The problem with that practice — then and now — is that it takes a lot of work to do well. It requires that we ask questions and also answer them, that we keep the peace, think carefully about what we share, update often, and most of all, always be paying attention.

So please, journalists, make this the year you delete your pending goodbye dissertations and get back into the conversation. If not you, someone else will.

Mandy Jenkins is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Millie Tran   There is no magic — you’ve got this

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Tshepo Tshabalala   Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers

Efrat Nechushtai   Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Tushar Banerjee   Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Frank Chimero   Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Seth C. Lewis   The gap between journalism and research is too wide

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Stephanie Edgerly   It’s time to understand the un-audience

Alyssa Zeisler   We expand what (and how and who) we serve

Axie Navas   The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Jesse Holcomb   We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism

Cristi Hegranes   A year to invest in the security of local journalists

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Angilee Shah   The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders

Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron   Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Amy Schmitz Weiss   Local news isn’t where you thought it was

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Hearken   Pivot to people

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Elisabeth Goodridge   Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Tyler Fisher   This is journalism’s do-or-die moment

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Mike Isaac   The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Adam B. Ellick   Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Jenée Desmond-Harris   It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Pia Frey   You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis

Raney Aronson-Rath   We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”

Sarah Stonbely   Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”

Whitney Phillips   Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended

Alexandra Borchardt   Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley   When a tech company pulls the plug on your story

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

J. Siguru Wahutu   Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Simon Galperin   After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession

Cindy Royal   For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Claire Wardle   Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Hossein Derakhshan   The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Frank Mungeam   Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Steve Myers   From trying to cover it all to covering what matters

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Matt Karolian   Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Jonathan Stray   More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh

Rebecca Lee Sanchez   We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Kevin D. Grant   A year to embrace journalism as public service

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Carrie Brown-Smith   Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Heather Chaplin   Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue

Amy King   We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Jennifer Dargan   You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Kjerstin Thorson   Time to get mad about information inequality (again)

Matt Waite   “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau   A more sincere definition of “community”

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Zainab Khan   Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Umbreen Bhatti   The story doesn’t end for the people we quote

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

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

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Robin Kwong   Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies