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Huge demand for…anything but politics

“We’ve been moving away from the publishing of static web pages for some time. We’ll now move away from putting our distribution in the hands of others.”

My 10 predictions for 2019:

1. News organizations will focus on owning their data and their destiny. The futile effort of asking platforms “May I please have my audience data please?” will cease in favor of defining and prioritizing success on our own platforms and on our own terms.

2. Transparency efforts will increase. I’m part of a group convened by the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute to explore media, trust, and democracy. One finding in our upcoming report is the importance of showing your work and demystifying the journalistic process. Campaigns like “Facts First” from CNN and that ominous “Democracy Dies in Darkness” from The Washington Post are critical brand messages. In 2019, we’ll go a step further and see more of the “how we got the story” genre, more overt explanations of the connection between journalism and democracy, and more clarity around what we change in our stories and why.

3. There will be great momentum to break away from the addictive nature of endless and empty feeds. Journalists will engage more with audiences and communities they seek to serve. More time will be spent out from behind screens, connecting with people IRL or using digital tools to connect at a more personal level.

4. Digital programming and distribution will get more nuanced, and more fun. We’ve been moving away from the publishing of static web pages for some time. We’ll now move away from putting our distribution in the hands of others. 2019 will bring more experiments with adaptive programming and content recommendation services.

5. Climate coverage will amp up and breakthrough. It’s past time. Audience interest is there. So is the urgency — the 2030 IPCC report was a big wakeup call. This is the year to go broader and deeper on all aspects of the climate change story. We’ll see better daily coverage and more head-turning enterprise and investigations.

6. There will be big swings in all things politics. 2019 is no prep year for the 2020 election — it’s game on. We’ll see more investigative reporting plus new ideas and innovative approaches to covering the campaign, the White House, and this remarkable moment in American and world history.

7. Newsletters up. Podcasts down.

8. 2019 will be the year of the deepfake. It will therefore be the year journalists — and hopefully audiences — get literate, trained up, and ready to combat the next level of disinformation.

9. Because Trump and all things politics will continue to dominate the news cycle, 2019 will also be the year of counterprogramming. Anyone with a Chartbeat account can see audiences crave a mix of nonpolitical news. Doing this well is important for our audiences and for the business of journalism.

10. Security and privacy will continue to be a concern. There’s a lot of carelessness still going on (password = “password,” anyone?) and bad actors are still at large. I predict we won’t see good news on this in 2019, but rather more hacks and a greater interest in what people, businesses, and governments can do to protect themselves.

Meredith Artley is editor-in-chief and senior vice president of CNN Digital Worldwide.

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

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

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

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

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

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

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

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

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

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

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

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

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

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

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

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

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

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

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

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

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

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

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

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

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

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

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

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

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

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

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

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

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

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

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

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

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

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

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

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

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

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

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

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

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

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

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

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

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

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

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

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

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

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

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

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

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

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

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

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

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

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

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

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

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

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

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

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

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

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

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

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

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

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

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

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

Hearken   Pivot to people

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

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

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

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

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

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you