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Haikus of the news

“We will discover / — despite our product roadmaps — / that one size fits none.”

We call them “users,”
but they’re individuals
doing their own thing.

Watch their behaviors.
Are they very similar?
Look how they differ!

Quinn reads newspapers,
Jamie skims aggregators,
Chris watches TV.

We will discover
— despite our product roadmaps —
that one size fits none.

Design, build, and test.
Prototype new solutions.
Meet them where they are.

Text Dale a chatbot,
push Pat notifications,
feed Sam on social.

Throw out the playbook!
Find each and every use case,
and ship bespoke news.

Recognize the needs
of the new news consumer.
“Users” are humans.

Libby Bawcombe is the manager of design research and strategy at NPR.

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

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

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

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

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

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

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

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

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

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

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

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

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

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

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

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

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

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

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

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

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

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

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

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

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

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

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

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

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

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

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

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

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

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

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

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

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

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

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

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

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

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

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

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

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Hearken   Pivot to people

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

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

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

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

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

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

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

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Manoush Zomorodi   Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

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

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

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

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

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

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

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

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

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

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

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

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

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

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

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

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

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

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

An Xiao Mina   The death of consensus, not the death of truth

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

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

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

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

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

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

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

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

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

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

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

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

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

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

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

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

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media