2
0
1
9

Spanish-language audio blows up

“In some ways, digital audio was made for the Spanish-language audience.”

Face to face. In 2019, audiences will define the sorts of relationships they want with their media, and they’ll increasingly demand real-world interactions.

Relationships won’t be vertical, but horizontal. Outlets that want to be successful will recognize this and continue offering their audiences online spaces, like private Slack, Facebook and WhatsApp groups to connect 1:1 with content creators. But these relationships won’t be (and shouldn’t be) limited to online interactions: in 2019, we’ll see a growing desire for IRL conversations that build stronger relationships between audiences and producers. I hope outlets and content creators will use these opportunities to have significant dialogues with audiences, and help readers and listeners understand how news is reported and why stories matter.

In early 2019 at Radio Ambulante we’ll be launching los Clubes de Escucha (listening clubs), in-person gatherings for people to listen together, talk about the stories we’ve produced, and build community around our content. Live events will be of increasing importance, not just for brand-building, but as opportunities to connect deeply with audiences we increasingly depend on.

Funders and grantmakers will support daring journalism entrepreneurs with an eye toward sustainability. Funders will recognize the need to support not only content creation, but also the creation of the business, legal and economic structures that make journalism sustainable. In other words, media funders in 2019 will understand that supporting journalism also means supporting forward-thinking journalism entrepreneurs from an early stage.

Spanish-language audio content will blow up in 2019, reaching not only Latin American audiences, but U.S.-based Latino listeners. There’s a huge opportunity coming for Spanish-language audio producers. The Latin American podcast market is showing real signs of life, with an exciting wave of producers, new shows, and growing audiences. In some ways, digital audio was made for the Spanish-language audience: With more than 400 million Spanish speakers from more than 20 countries, there is great potential to aggregate huge audiences with niche offerings. As dynamic, geo-located ads become the industry standard, the possibility of monetizing shows with large audiences spread across a dozen countries will become all the more enticing.

Carolina Guerrero is CEO and co-founder of Radio Ambulante.

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

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

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

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

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

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

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

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

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Carrie Brown   Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

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

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

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

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

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

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

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

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

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

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

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

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

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

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

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

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

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

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

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

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Nik Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

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

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

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

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

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

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

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

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

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

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

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

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

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

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

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

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

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

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

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

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

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

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

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

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

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

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

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

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

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

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

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

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Hearken   Pivot to people

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

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

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

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

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

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

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

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

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

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

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

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

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

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

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

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

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

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

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

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

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

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era