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.