2
0
1
9

The rise of the conveners

“As the internet becomes more saturated and noisy, consumers are searching for real, authentic human conversation that is more engaging than today’s passive media model.”

In 2019, the media power dynamic will shift dramatically — from the establishment led by traditional communicators (journalists) toward communities led by new conveners (podcast hosts, Facebook group administrators, newsletter writers, and all kinds of personalities).

As the internet becomes more saturated and noisy, consumers are searching for real, authentic human conversation that is more engaging than today’s passive media model. They’re sick of just listening, reading, and watching. They want to be speaking, collaborating, and taking action.

As a result, hyper-niche communities are popping up everywhere. These digital and physical groups of people who gather around similar beliefs or interests have become particularly potent in the political space. Many people would point to Pod Save America as one of the noisiest niche communities of the last few years. This micro-community of millions of progressive change-makers is built around former White House staffers turned podcast hosts. But conservative personalities were way ahead of the curve on this trend: People like Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart saw the power of convening years ago and began building their collectives over the past decade. In 2019, micro-communities will go mainstream.

These communities — whether they center on formats like podcasts, Facebook Groups or newsletters — close the gap between the “voice” of information (in this case, the hosts, newsletter writers, founders, group admins, and moderators) and the audience, the people who act on information.

While journalists and others with large social followings will still have important megaphones, the biggest difference we’ll see in 2019 will be a surge of conveners who start conversations with no association with a news organization and who don’t consider themselves a journalist or reporter of any kind. They’re just themselves, and that’s what has created such a strong community around them. The commentator, regardless of their platform or pedigree, has become the convener.

Another trend to watch will be the rise of a new town square, built by conveners, that serves as a gathering place for people starved for real conversation that goes beyond a social media post. That town square includes platforms that have often been neglected by the mainstream media like LinkedIn (for business leaders), Patreon (for audio and video creators), and VSCO (for budding photographers).

Of course, there are downsides to these smaller communities. They are likely centered around the reinforcement of a specific worldview, and in an increasingly polarized landscape filled with “fake news,” this can be problematic.

But it’s possible that traditional media, which long neglected the power of authenticity and avoided two-way communication with its readers, is what pushed the audience into these communities. Perhaps the most radical difference people see between the media and these micro-community creators is the conveners’ ability to bring passionate and earnest people into community with each other.

Callie Schweitzer is the founder and CEO of CSCH, a creative strategy firm.

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

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

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

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

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

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

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

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

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

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

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

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

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

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

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Hearken   Pivot to people

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

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

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

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

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

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

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

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

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

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

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

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

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

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

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

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

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

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

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

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

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

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

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

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

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

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

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

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

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

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

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

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

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

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

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

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

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

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

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

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

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

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

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

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

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

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

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

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

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

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

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

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

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

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

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

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

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

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

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

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

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

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

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

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

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

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

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

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

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

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

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

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

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news