2
0
1
9

We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)

“If an established, legacy newsroom hired 15, 23 year olds to run a vertical of their own, I’d read that. And maybe 23 year olds would, too.”

We’ll hear from the youth: The kids don’t trust us. My friend, a high school teacher in Columbus, Ohio, says her students question her choice to use the New York Times as a trusted source. It does seem, though, that they trust each other a bit more — have you read about flop accounts? Maybe next year we’ll incorporate more youth voices (we certainly plan to at The Lily). Not by interviewing them or telling their stories, but by letting them tell their stories themselves. What would be really great is if an established, legacy newsroom hired 15 23-year-olds to run a vertical of their own. I’d read that. And maybe 23-year-olds would, too.

We’ll be even better at Instagram: For me, this blank canvas of a platform continues to be the most fun place to craft a new brand and meaningfully connection with readers. Most media brand IG accounts have a lot of room for improvement, which is exciting. It’s like when I meet someone who has never seen a single episode of “Friday Night Lights.” They have so much joy (and Tim Riggins) ahead of them. Publications without a solid Instagram strategy need only hire someone who really understands the platform, an art director or two, and start experimenting. You may find yourself launching an Instagram-only book club or painting a mural live on election night.

Amy King is editor in chief and creative director of The Lily, a publication from The Washington Post.

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

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

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

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

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

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

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

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

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

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

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

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

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

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

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

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

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

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

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

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

Hearken   Pivot to people

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

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

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

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

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

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

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

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

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

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

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

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

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

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

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

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

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

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

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

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

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

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

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

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

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

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

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

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

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

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

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

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

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

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

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

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

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

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

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

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

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

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

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

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

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

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

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

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

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

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

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

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

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

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

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

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

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

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

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

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

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video