My prediction, my hope, for journalism in 2019 is that we invest more in diversity in international reporting — and that we get better at explaining the world and what it means to be a person in it.
In a world where nationalism is on the rise, where there are 258 million migrants, where the themes of migration, immigration, and asylum continue to dominate headlines and political discourse, we need more nuanced coverage of the people and countries beyond our own borders.
A vital and necessary starting point is to have a diversity of voices and perspectives making international journalism. This argument has long been made, and with good reason: When our journalists come from different backgrounds, it enhances and enrichens our journalism. They bring different lived experiences to their reporting and different angles they might focus on. They have different access to sources, and they train their lens on different subjects and frame stories in varied ways.
There will always be a difference in how a story is framed, edited, and told by a journalist who gets to leave at the end of the day and one who is at home in the circumstances and community of the story.
Which is why we need diversity, not only in our local and national newsrooms, but also in our international coverage, which is often dominated by Western journalists, white reporters, men. Foreign correspondents can often bring fresh eyes to the regions they cover — but we need to hear more from the people who live in the places we report on.
What would our international coverage look like if we handed the reins over to locals to report on the countries where they live, whose cultures, histories, and politics they are intimately familiar with? What would a day of news coverage look like if women from around the world were our assignment editors and reporters? Which stories would they choose to tell, and how would they frame those stories?
What if the stories of immigrants and migrants seeking to come to America were told exclusively, for a day, by immigrants and migrants looking to come to America? What if our reporting better described people — who they love, what they fear, how they live — beyond their nationality and migration status? What if we knew, not only about the grueling journey of refugees, but also about brides, midwives, and football matches in refugee camps? About the homes and traditions they left behind, and the trepidation and anticipation with which they embarked on their journeys? What would our homepages, social feeds, and push alerts look like?
What forgotten stories would we shine a spotlight on? Which oft-silenced voices would be amplified?
There’s a lot of good, nuanced reporting out there. But we need more. I hope in the next year, we hear from more people who are at home in the countries, cultures, and circumstances we’re covering, not just from foreign correspondents parachuting in for a few weeks, months, or years.
Masuma Ahuja is an independent journalist covering gender, migration, and human rights.
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
AX Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important