2
0
1
9

Voting rights becomes the new climate change

“Voter suppression doesn’t have to overturn an election to have an impact.”

The truth has been known for years.

But at first it doesn’t get much coverage because its impact maybe seems far off or hypothetical. When it does get covered, it gets framed as a partisan debate, with both sides given equal weight.

Then, boom, suddenly we’re staring an existential threat in the face. This is the cycle we went through with climate change for years before the media pushed its way out of false equivalence. It stopped giving doubters’ claims equal weight to scientific evidence. Climate change started getting covered as a real thing, not something that’s up for political debate.

Today we’re somewhere near the beginning of this stage with voting rights. Since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Republican legislatures across the country have passed sweeping restrictions that often make it harder for black and brown voters to exercise their franchise. And they’ve done it based on a made-up threat: voter fraud.

Stacks and stacks of research show that widespread voter fraud hasn’t been a problem in American elections. But the specter gets raised time and time again, often with racist undertones, as states make it more difficult to vote. And the coverage too often frames it as a “Republicans say, Democrats say” issue.

It’s an issue that’s going to take on even more significance in the 2020 election. Now, the coverage is beginning to shift. This will be the year it accelerates.

More and more journalists will understand this isn’t an issue you can ignore, or an issue you can frame as a debate. Yes, we’re an independent and nonpartisan press. We don’t choose sides. But we do traffic in facts. And we do call out lies.

People often ask the question whether any of these voter restrictions have actually swung an election. Now, that is up for debate, and a difficult question to answer. But it might not be the right question to ask.

Voter suppression doesn’t have to overturn an election to have an impact. Denying someone the right to vote is denying them power and participation in society. Not that long ago, black people were killed and beaten for trying to vote.

And, as we suddenly deal with the ravaging consequences of a warming planet, we won’t wait until voter suppression does actually alter the trajectory of our democracy to take it seriously.

Andrew Donohue is the managing editor of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

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

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

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

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

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

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

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

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

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

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

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

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

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

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

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

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

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

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

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

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

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

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

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

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

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

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

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

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

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

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

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

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

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

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

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

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

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

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

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

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

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

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

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

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

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

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

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

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

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

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

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

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

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

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

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

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

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

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

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

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

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

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

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

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

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

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

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

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

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

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

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

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

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

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Hearken   Pivot to people

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

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

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

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

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

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

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

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

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories