In 2019, we’ll meet people where they are — and actually listen to what they want.
The general idea isn’t new, but the failure of Facebook video across the industry showed that media companies weren’t looking critically at their platform-specific audiences. We understood that Facebook was a place where many readers (that’s crucial: readers, not viewers) were, but we didn’t dig into what that audience was there for (spoiler: it wasn’t video).
I think (hope!) this will be the year that publications take this lesson to heart, choosing to invest in smart content that makes sense for a given audience in a given place and making that content easy to access, truly meeting people where they are in every sense. This almost sounds too simple — building up video on YouTube, for example, or partnering with streaming services — but hey, maybe we need to get back to basics.
We’ll see newsletter obsessives being sent more and more original written work instead of rote link roundups, because those are the people who like to read. We’ll see visual and video teams own their pubs’ Instagram accounts, because people are on Instagram for beautiful pictures, sometimes ones that move.
While we’ll care about brand loyalists who consume everything we make across so many platforms, we’ll be less concerned with turning the Facebook fan into a YouTube follower and more concerned with serving them fully where they already exist. Growth will come from finding other people hanging out on these platforms who haven’t yet discovered us and showing them our best work. You can’t make someone who doesn’t want to watch videos watch videos, or someone who doesn’t want to read longform read longform, and this is the year we’ll finally be okay with that.
Julia Rubin is editor of The Goods by Vox.
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Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
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Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
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Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
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Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
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Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
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Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
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Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
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Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
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Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
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M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
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Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
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Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
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Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
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Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
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Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
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Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)