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Meeting people where they are

“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.”

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.

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Hearken   Pivot to people

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

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

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

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

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

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

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

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

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

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

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

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

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

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

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

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

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

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

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

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

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

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

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

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

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

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

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

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

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

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

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

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

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

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

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

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

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

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

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

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

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

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

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

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

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

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

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

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

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

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

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

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

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

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

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

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

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

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

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

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

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

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

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

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

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

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

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

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

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

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

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

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

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

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

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

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

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations