2
0
1
9

The great re-pivot to audio

“The middlemen who profit — agencies, buyers, and the like. They’ve been waiting for a moment like this.”

2018. Depending on whom you ask, it either was the worst year for audio or the best.

And it seems like almost every year, whenever you talk about audio, the words “golden age” accompany the discussion. There must be some marketing or lobbying machine pitching that narrative constantly. It comes across more like a mass conspiracy than reality.

Then the mass of layoffs. Digital powerhouses including BuzzFeed, Panoply, and Audible led many to wonder whether podcasting was experiencing some sort of bubble. I haven’t seen the landscape greatly impacted by these changes — just the lives of many whose livelihoods have been thrown for a curve, many I call friends.

The idea that producing audio is fast and cheap — you know, the pick-two of the iron product triangle — is what investors, money people, and those who don’t sit staring at scripts twelve minutes too long pretend to love about audio. But producing audio isn’t fast, and quality is certainly not cheap. Relative to its other medium counterparts, yes, in theory.

The place where the lack of quality seems to bump its head, again and again, is all those awful, almost-every-weekend festivals, where the same cast of characters trumps their versions of podcast Tupperware. I don’t know about you, but I’m not buying this stuff. It’s all feeling too multilevel marketing to me, too much Kool-Aid. Everyone’s showing off their Mary Kay Cadillacs, but no one’s saying how they drove themselves to such success.

With all that, so many companies who pivoted to audio — testing the waters by adding their formulary to the equation, only to see their Red Dye No. 5 not catch on — have been left with an inscrutable itch that must be scratched in 2019. They will re-pivot back to audio.

Why?

Anyone who pivots knows that the act itself is one of self-preservation — seeking to hand the ball to someone else, who’ll probably run into the same trouble as the last player, but figure out who to get it to next. The person with the ball acts with such fervor that it seems like the ball is some hot potato straight out of the oven — when in actuality, the shiny potato isn’t hot, but acting like it is seems to keep stakeholders (board members, investors, agencies) excitably hopeful.

Speaking of potatoes, what are you eating tonight? Did you know for less than $10 per serving, Blue Apron delivers seasonal recipes along with pre-portioned ingredients to make delicious, home-cooked meals? Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism 2019 listeners get their first three meals free by going to www-dot-…

Which leads me to the advertisers, and the world that lives off the ecosystem of inventory and media buys.

There’s no question that the boom in the world of audio has been heard loud and clear. Podcasts have been around for more than a decade, but it’s only in the past few years that they’ve been getting attention. And why? The middlemen who profit — agencies, buyers, and the like. They’ve been waiting for a moment like this. When their worlds of print, banner ads, and billboards came crashing down, the landscape was bleak. But now in the wild west of audio, they can be both the Sheriff and the Bandido. They’re not about to turn their backs on this opportunity, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see these players actually become producers themselves in order to boost inventory to sell.

There’s too much riding on any one person or group to shy away from audio. 2018 was just a year that some in the business needed a break. A separation. A time to see other mediums. But like the great platform and distributor that she is, audio will have them running back, asking for forgiveness, begging to be taken back, asking if we can try just one more time. Sadly, despite her name, audio is silent. She’ll take him back and pretend nothing happened. They’ll date again in 2019; some will go on to get married, have children, and start saving for the next cold, bleak, dead winter.

You see, it’s all a cycle. Next year, guaranteed, someone out there will say that “this year is the golden age for audio,” and that feeling of a marketing conspiracy will sound more like a recommitment to trying things again, like the first time never happened.

Andrew Ramsammy is CEO and founder of UnitedPublic Strategies.

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

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

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

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

Joshua Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

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

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

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

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

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

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

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

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

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

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

Juleyka Lantigua-Williams   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

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

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

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

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

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

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

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

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Hearken   Pivot to people

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

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

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

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

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

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

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

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

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

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

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

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

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

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

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

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

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

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

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

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

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

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

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

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

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

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

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

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

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

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

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

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

james Wahutu   Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

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

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

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

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

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

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

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

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

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

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

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

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

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

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

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

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

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

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

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

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

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

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

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

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

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

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

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

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

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator