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