The Pareto principle, which is also known as the 80-20 rule, states that 80 percent of your outcomes come from 20 percent of your inputs. It’s named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who helped develop the field of microeconomics. He observed that 80 percent of land in Italy was owned by about 20 percent of the population. Another example can be how 80 percent of a company’s revenue is generated by 20 percent of its customers.
But the numbers aren’t important here: It’s about the vital few and how a small number of things you do account for the majority of the outcomes.
“Personal wellness is 80 percent behavior and 20 percent knowledge,” Rebecca Shern writes. “And here’s the secret: we already have the necessary information. Stop searching.” As someone who goes down productivity rabbit holes, I found this statement life-changing. It’s not only about seeking more knowledge, but improving our daily choices.
You could replace personal wellness with doing good journalism. We know the best practices and what the tools are. It’s about the day-to-day doing, the actions and behaviors driven by your values that become good habits that become the foundations of a sustainable business.
I started my career launching a membership model, then moved to podcasts, newsletters, and apps, with some other stops in between. That was almost a decade ago now — and if you’ve been in this longer, time can feel like a flat circle. Homepages are back again after being dead, and back again after another death. Things change, but slower than you think, and mostly cyclically.
“True innovation isn’t just some magic carnival of invention, like a Steve Jobs keynote with a pretty toy at the end. It is a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment that every institution and business experiences in some way,” writes David Sax in The New York Times. “Often that actually means adopting ideas and tools that already exist but make sense in a new context, or even returning to methods that worked in the past.”
It was never about putting all your eggs into one platform basket, or chasing every new thing. It was and always will be about serving your readers and now viewers, listeners, users and continuing to do so by adapting journalism fundamentals to ever-evolving contexts and challenges. That means also adapting how you reach them, whether that’s through search, social, an email, app, or ideally directly, and in whatever the best format may be. And finally, that also means constantly experimenting and diversifying your revenue streams to adapt to ever-changing market conditions.
Next year will be the year of going back to basics. Play the long game. There is no magic, only work.
Millie Tran is global growth editor at The New York Times.
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era