2
0
1
9

More access, but not that kind

“It’s about shifting from thinking about conversation mainly as a reaction or afterthought to making it more central to how we conceive of and tell stories.”

“Access” in journalism has long been used to describe the relationship between reporters and their sources. But in 2019, it could come to describe another journalistic relationship that’s growing in importance: the one between journalists and their audience.

The pathways for news consumers to have more meaningful access to journalists are proliferating — beyond social media comments and mentions. It’s easier for newsrooms to tell stories by texting with their audience, more people are getting news via chat apps, and now journalists can get feedback, opinions, and questions from the audience through interactive video features, such as with Instagram Stories’ question feature (not to mention DMs).

And you might have noticed that access to journalists emerges as a theme when you look at efforts aimed at rebuilding the American public’s trust in journalism. I’ve long considered two-way conversation between journalists and news consumers one of the fundamentals of digital best practice, but the idea of direct access really hit home for me last month, when I interviewed Twitch users about climate change. Well, really, I was interviewing them for a research project about a Twitch channel that deals with climate change: ClimateFortnite, where climate scientists share their knowledge while streaming their Fortnite play.

Although I completed only seven interviews, I was struck by a unanimous agreement among my interviewees: They all named the channel’s text chat space as the biggest advantage of the channel as a vehicle for information about climate change, mainly because it allows users access to an expert who speaks credibly and directly about climate change.

Yes, newsrooms have tried many iterations of content aimed at conversation: comment sections, Reddit AMAs, Facebook Live discussions, etc. But many of these efforts are packaged into one story or project, or are left to certain teams instead of becoming a collective and sustainable responsibility of the whole newsroom.

Unfortunately, we all know all too well, as did some of my Twitch interviewees, that some channels for two-way conversation between journalists and their audience can become toxic or threatening. That is always part of the concern and equation when considering access to journalists, especially in today’s climate. But some of the avenues becoming increasingly available encourage more directed and less amplified conversation, which could help mitigate some of the risks.

The shift for newsrooms in 2019 toward this type of access doesn’t have to be drastic. It’s about shifting from thinking about conversation mainly as a reaction or afterthought to making it more central to how we conceive of and tell stories. As part of the continual evolution of storytelling that the internet has brought us, it’s now time to ask whether more stories can be conceived as a back and forth, or to consider two-way conversation part of the routine, rather than a bonus.

Laura E. Davis is an assistant professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.

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

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

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

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

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

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

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

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

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

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

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

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

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

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

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

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

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

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

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

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

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

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

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

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

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

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

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

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

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

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

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

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

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

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

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

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

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

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

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

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

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

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

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

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

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

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

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

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

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

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

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

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

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

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

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

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

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

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

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

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

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

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

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

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

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

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Hearken   Pivot to people

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

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

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

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

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

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

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

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

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

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

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

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

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

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

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

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

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

AX Mina   The death of consensus, not the death of truth

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration