Back when I practiced law, I would get calls from journalists about my cases. I never had it in me to answer those calls; I always needed to breathe and collect myself before calling back. And sometimes, when we eventually did speak, I’d sense that they’d already written their stories — not because I took too long to call back (I was nervous, not a jerk), but because they’d constructed them, even if only in their heads, before they’d ever called me. I was just a character, and they were just looking for their quote.
Later, after I left law for journalism, I learned that journalists do, in fact, call the people in their stories “characters.” I remember how astonished I was when I learned that.
In 2019, I hope to see us talk more about the implications of approaching journalism as the work of telling stories — specifically, what it means for the people in those stories. Because stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. They don’t work without conflict. An arc. They elicit emotional responses. And they need characters — heroes, villains, helpers, and more — to do that.
But people aren’t characters — “characters” only exist for the purposes of a story. People, on the other hand, watch, listen to, and read those stories that contain “characters” who share their names. They often don’t recognize themselves in the narratives the journalists have spun, perhaps because their long interactions were reduced to a soundbite, or because what they see is such a small slice of who they are and what they believe.
What is the journalist’s responsibility to these people, who continue to exist long after the story’s publication — whose names may now have a new top Google result? Who may never want to speak to a journalist again, and who might tell their friends and family and community to do the same? How does this responsibility square with the journalist’s responsibility to the rest of the audience? And how can news organizations show audiences that they grapple with these and other questions of power and the possibility of harm, however inadvertent? Because this, too, is impact — just not the kind I think we want to be having.
Umbreen Bhatti is the director of the KQED Lab.
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
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Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
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LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
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Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
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Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
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Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
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Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
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Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
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Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Juleyka Lantigua-Williams Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
james Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Joshua Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times