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