2
0
1
9

Journalism becomes the escape

“Wouldn’t it be great if news organizations felt like something known, loved and trusted? If our neighbors retreated into work created by our organizations like they do into private texting groups or Netflix binges or that cozy corner booth at a favorite restaurant?”

If you pause and listen closely, those muffled sounds you hear are the slight chuckles of local journalists in the D.C. area when something is described as being “XYZ blocks away from the White House.”

Proximity to the Oval Office — whether in actual distance or tangential connection — has been an all-consuming focus for many news organizations in 2018. It’s understandable: This is an administration without precedent in many important ways. People care deeply about it and the decisions made there affect all of us.

In 2019, though, there’s a significant opportunity in choosing to cover anything but what’s happening at the White House — especially at the local level.

No matter one’s political persuasion, people are pretty worn out by this news cycle. We also know that retreating into the things that are known, loved and trusted is how many are choosing to deal with it.

Some call this escapism. But what if we took that desire to escape and used it as fuel for relevancy?

Wouldn’t it be great if news organizations felt like something known, loved and trusted? If our neighbors retreated into work created by our organizations like they do into private texting groups or Netflix binges or that cozy corner booth at a favorite restaurant?

What if we made people feel like they were in the know, part of the club, invested-in, listened-to?

What if we spent more time sharing what’s happening in our communities through the experiences of individual people? Or explaining complicated topics in ways that do less to show how much journalists know and instead demonstrate how interested we are in helping our neighbors understand?

If we can prove our relevancy in this news environment, and earn the time and trust of our neighbors, no matter how things change, we’ll have already built something they value — something with a compelling case for financial support, too.

Our world right now is especially poised for journalism that makes people feel known and heard.

In 2019, the next time something happens that makes your community want to retreat, commit to meeting them there with information they value.

Kelsey Proud is managing editor of digital at WAMU in Washington, D.C.

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

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

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

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

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

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

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

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

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

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

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

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

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

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

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

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

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

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

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

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

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

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

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

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

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

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

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

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

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

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

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

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

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

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

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

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

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

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

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

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

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

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

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

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

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

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

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

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

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

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

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

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

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Hearken   Pivot to people

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

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

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

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

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

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

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

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

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

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

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

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

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

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

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

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

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

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

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

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

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

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

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

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

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

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

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

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

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

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

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