2
0
1
9

The year product leads media

“We will start to see more senior leadership in news organizations that comes from design, product, and technology backgrounds.”

In 2018, we’ve seen the acceleration of trends in which older, advertising-centric, scale-driven media models are becoming less and less sustainable, while user-centered, product-focused approaches gain traction. Looking forward, 2019 may well be the year when product-led media moves from the fringes to achieve true significance and maturity.

In recent years, we’ve seen dependence on massive scale become less feasible for many media organizations, especially as platforms like Facebook have deprioritized news items in their algorithms. In turn, advertising models that largely depend on that scale are becoming similarly implausible. These two trends are most starkly depicted in Verizon’s explanation for its abysmal valuation of its Oath media properties.

In parallel, there has been positive growth and engagement in areas that take a more product oriented approach to news, focusing on user needs in a more narrow and thoughtful way. We see this in the rise of products that develop a deeper relationship between journalists and audiences around niche topics, like podcasts and newsletters, as well as in service-oriented media products that support user needs around particular areas of their lives, like cooking or wellness. These initiatives provide better paths to success in two ways. First, they focus on cultivating specific audiences that can then be sold to advertisers while respecting the privacy and data rights of those readers. Second, strong relationships between publishers and readers can lead to natural subscription or membership models based on both product value and an affinity to a brand.

This shift has been challenging for many media companies because they tend to be led by people with backgrounds in editorial and advertising — practices that are inherently reactive, opportunistic, and ephemeral. Those skills make for good, fast reporting and effective sales pitches, but often do not provide a long-term view of how a product will evolve and grow, improving over time. Successful product development requires a proactive, holistic, and considered process with deep systems thinking. One small change to a product experience can have wide ranging knock-on effects that users have to live with — you can’t simply issue a “correction” for your app and move on.

In 2019 and beyond, it’s likely that we will start to see more senior leadership in news organizations that comes from design, product, and technology backgrounds, to provide the kind of partnership with editorial that will allow for compelling user experiences and media products that can thrive in the years to come. Those that succeed will see their readers as their primary customer base, and not their advertisers.

Alexis Lloyd is the head of design innovation at Automattic. Matt Boggie is CTO at The Skimm.

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

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

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

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

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

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

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

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

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

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

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

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

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

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

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

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

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

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

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

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

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

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

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

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

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

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

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

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

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

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

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

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

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

Hearken   Pivot to people

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

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

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

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

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

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

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

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

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

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

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

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

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

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

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

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

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

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

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

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

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

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

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

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

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

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

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

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

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

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

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

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

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

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

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

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

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

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

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

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

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

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

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

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

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

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

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

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

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

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

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners