2
0
1
9

Say it with me: Racism

“We are not in the hint business; we are here to report facts, including the difficult facts of racism.”

While I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, here’s one I’m definitely encouraging for 2019: It’s time for all of us in journalism to pledge to not just report on racism, but to call it out.

Many of us know racism when we see it, and we’ve seen plenty of it in recent years, from the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville to white people repeatedly calling the police on black people for doing everyday activities. But we haven’t always reported it that way, and we should be asking ourselves and our colleagues why race continues to be treated like a four-letter word.

We don’t say “gender-tinged” when we mean sexist. If we’re honest, talking about race makes white Americans — including journalists — uncomfortable. We see constant proof of this in the journo-gymnastics of our headlines and ledes, with toothless phrases like “racial rhetoric,” “racially charged” or “racially tinged.” They mean little, and do even less to convey what it is that we’re actually trying to report.

But more than that: Such phrases have risen to terms of art for our profession that often feel like a wink and a nod to viewers, readers and listeners that assumes a shared set of values, putting the onus on them to figure out what we mean instead of being explicit. It’s a “both sides” approach that leaves room for doubt and dismissal.

Our avoidance of this issue — and the historical harm done as a result — has already come under scrutiny on social media and in essays. It also leaves many journalists of color, who are often less hesitant to make it plain when racism makes news, alone in the fight and pleading their case to squeamish gatekeepers.  

By not confronting racism or reducing it to matter of opinion on an individual or systemic level in our journalism — the first draft of history — we leave a less accurate record for those who come behind us. We are not in the hint business; we are here to report facts, including the difficult facts of racism.

There will be much more to report in the coming year. As race intersects with every aspect of our society, from sports to politics to education, journalists must have their own reckoning around talking about race.

In an era that has seen a resurgence in racial polarization, retreat cannot be the response. We must resolve to do better, and make this a resolution that actually sticks.

Errin Haines Whack is The Associated Press’ national writer on race and ethnicity.

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

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

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

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

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

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

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

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

Hearken   Pivot to people

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

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

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

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

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

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

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

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

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

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

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

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

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

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

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

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

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

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

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

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

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

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

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

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

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

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

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

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

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

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

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

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

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

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

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

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

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

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

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

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

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

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

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

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

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

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

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

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

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

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

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

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

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

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

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

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

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

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

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

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

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

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

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

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

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

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

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

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

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

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