We believe 2019 will mark the beginning of a significant shift in the news industry: the year when newsrooms stop pivoting to formats and platforms and start building relationships for the future. Already we’re seeing the rumblings of a seismic change, as digital bubbles built upon illusory metrics begin to burst and the organizations that have put in the unsexy but necessary groundwork to directly understand and serve their audiences are reaping rewards.
As newsrooms define their missions explicitly around service-first approaches and align around value-based business models, we can imagine how this could play out in the coming year.
Finally — finally! — a pivot that actually works. Although truth be told, this isn’t a pivot — it’s the rediscovery of the force that drove us to j-school many years ago. That force: the commitment to inform the public about their world so they can fully participate in and understand it. By refocusing attention on the audiences we serve, newsrooms will develop deep, sustaining relationships that will begin to repair the outdated, broken business models. Newsrooms are becoming increasingly sophisticated in developing the relationship between audience members and revenue. With a wealth of experience and nothing left to lose, 2019 will be the year this approach breaks through from theory into practice.
Newsrooms have guidelines around how they treat sources. But as co-created content blurs the line between maker and decision-maker, public and staff, newsrooms will need more sophisticated rules for how they work alongside, feature, credit, reward, compensate and protect the people engaging with them pre-publication. We predict the Gather community of engaged journalists will play a key role in building out the work started at SRCCON toward developing an ethical framework for engagement. (That is: In 2019, newsrooms will start to recognize and correct when they’re being askholes.)
Serving the audience means understanding what they need to know, which breaks journalism free from the restrictions of which platform they use and their medium of publication. The new answer: whatever makes sense for the audience. The end result of reporting will no longer necessarily be a story. It could be a community event, or a conversation, or even a puppet show (wait, that one already happened). What was produced will take a back seat to the all-important question of who was informed and how it served them.
If you know what the acronym CRM means, you’re more likely to be working on the revenue side of journalism or be in a management or innovation position. In 2019, editorial staffers will learn about customer relationship management systems and start to understand how CRMs can benefit their work. (If you don’t know, a CRM helps you track user data and communication, with an eye toward deepening people’s relationship with your organization.)
We predict that as newsrooms continue to open up to their communities, the public won’t just be supporting what newsrooms do by contributing financially (through subscriptions, donations, or membership programs) — they’ll be contributing on the front end to shape and enrich coverage, to provide content and insight for the journalism newsrooms are producing.
This will create the need for editorial relationship management systems so content and revenue departments can understand the full “user journey” with their brand. Creating a universal system will be no small technical task, but the tremendous insights it will yield will justify the investment. Beyond high-level trends of how public engagement leads to revenue, newsrooms will be able to see and value the public as more than a click or a dollar amount, but start to understand individuals holistically and serve them accordingly. (If you’re interested in this, holler.)
Content consumption metrics and analytics platforms like Chartbeat and Parse.ly were early to the gate in shaping newsroom priorities and their understanding of engagement. But trying to make sense of people’s behaviors, desires and impulses by the digital traces (archaeology) they leave behind will be understood as just one blurry half of the picture. In 2019, the anthropological arm of journalism will continue to develop, and more newsrooms will make it a priority to actually talk to their living, breathing audience members in deeper and more sustained ways to understand and serve their needs. The work of Spaceship Media, The Free Press’ News Voices, and pioneering practitioners like jesikah maria ross at Capital Public Radio and Ashley Alvarado at KPCC will start to be recognized and valued at a premium. While reconstructing the public’s needs and wants via their digital traces and artificial intelligence will continue to attract interest for how “clean” and efficient it can be, the inherent limits and dangers of flattening the public to datasets will be felt, and so will the lack of trust-building that is created through real-life engagement.
As pageview-driven business models continue to struggle, newsrooms will try to identify and agree upon what’s useful (and realistic) to measure about their journalism, in order to show its value to different stakeholders, like the audience (subscriber or member models), advertisers or sponsors, and grant funders. In 2019, journalists — and the people on the business side of their organizations — will share what’s working from their own experiments, and learn from research (such as that by the Center for Media Engagement, Pew Research Center, Trusting News, Membership Puzzle Project, and others). As the Membership Puzzle Project says, the “metrics for evaluating success and deliverables at the conclusion of the experiment should themselves be part of the experiment” a newsroom undertakes. We predict this experimentation culture with metrics will begin bearing fruit by the end of 2019. These new metrics likely will take more effort to measure than the industry’s previous golden metrics (circulation, pageviews, time on page).
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Newsrooms are moving at a glacial pace to diversify their staff and retain journalists who come from underrepresented or marginalized communities. So newsrooms leaders? Do better.
Now the first problem begets a second issue: the diversity of sources cited in reporting. As we advocate for radical transparency about the makeup of our newsrooms (slow as that may be), newsrooms will begin to track and talk more publicly about the diversity of their sources. The industry knows this is an issue because journalists like Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato and Greg Linch (among many others) are building databases to combat this. But consider this: Tracking source diversity will be a part of the monthly newsroom analytics report, presented to staff regularly and yes, made public. Let’s dream a little further here: What if AI evolved to a point where it could comb stories for these identifiers (without racist implications) and this data point became a staple in analytics dashboards?
Public media stations such as KUT in Austin, WHYY in Philadelphia, KUOW in Seattle, and KQED in San Francisco are already doing this work and confronting some of the unflattering numbers. If newsrooms are serious about building and gaining the trust of their audiences, they’ll be completely honest to the public about what their newsroom looks like and who they’re talking to in their stories.
WIthout professional development budgets, journalists are seeking out and creating new spaces to learn from one another. For example, there are active Facebook Groups for public media millenials, diverse social media editors, and TV news producers, as well as Slack organizations for news nerds, audience engagement people, and journalists of color. In 2019, we’ll see continued growth in the number of Slack organizations and Facebook Groups related to journalists’ identities and roles. It’s also likely the existing digital groups will grow their membership, leading to the problems that inevitably emerge as a close-knit community scales from dozens to hundreds to thousands.
Through these other ways of connecting and learning, journalists may not see as much value in high-dollar professional organization memberships, or may cut back to only belonging to one rather than two or three. The professional organizations will be forced to assess what they can offer that these free and often well-moderated communities can’t, or partner with these communities to provide value. (Maybe improved moderation, or upgrading Slacks to the paid plans.)
To better meet the demands of an audience-driven mission, newsrooms will begin seeking candidates from non-traditional backgrounds who bring an array of needed skills to the table.
As traditional institutions continue to battle market and cultural forces for relevance and sustainability, dalliances will turn into full-fledged partnerships, and new shared futures will emerge. Poised for the hookup are libraries and newsrooms. They both serve the function of helping people get the information they’re seeking, except one institution has more public trust, more geographic and demographic diversity, and a more stable tax-supported future. The other has a lot of eager people (employed and laid off) with skills and desire to generate new information and be of service to their communities.
In 2019, we’ll start to see more collaborations like this one between The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Public Library and this one between The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library that pave the way for actual mergers of functions, resources, talent, and service.
Thanks to Darryl Holliday from City Bureau and Simon Galperin from GroundSource and Community Information Cooperative for the conference lobby brainstorm session on this library-newsroom baby idea.
Beyond news outlets and libraries, what other institutions are responsible for providing trustworthy information to the public so they can make informed choices? All of them. The education, healthcare, policy, and financial sectors (to name a few) are wrestling with the same struggle: going from largely closed and autocratic decision-making systems to being more participatory and democratized. What might journalism learn from what’s working in these other fields? We’ll only find out if we start to ask those questions and intentionally co-mingle. We predict 2019 will bring at least one new interdisciplinary gathering.
With the recent collapse of Mic, layoffs at Vox Media, and countless other examples of news startups raising huge and missing marks, the intrepid entrepreneurs building the next generation of media companies will think twice when considering venture capital models and promising billion-dollar unicorn exits. Instead, they’ll align the investment dollars with the service values their companies espouse and turn to zebras. They’ll seek to balance profit and purpose, and like the actual zebra, will have competitive advantages not through being an outlier, but through cooperation. Instead of using “maximize shareholder revenue” as their north star, they’ll more creatively organize their companies to be able to pursue a double bottom line. Likewise, newly activated investors will look to support media companies working in this way. We’ll start to see philanthropy and others invest in revenue-based financing that supports the 81 percent of undercapitalized entrepreneurs.
So those were a lot of predictions. And we’re going to be working toward making all of them come true. As can be gleaned from the fact this was a collaborative post, we love collaborating. So don’t be shy if you feel like creating this future together.
This prediction was written by Hearken staffers Jennifer Brandel, Julia Haslanger, Krystina Martinez, and Bridget Thoreson.
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Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
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Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
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Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
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Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
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Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
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Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
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Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
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Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
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Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime