If we continue to overinvest in short-term traffic goals and platforms, and if media revenue models pivot at our current unsustainable rates across the industry, we will rapidly lose early-career journalists. We’re at risk of permanently losing a generation of journalists to other fields due to instability — but also because of poor management, lack of support, and opportunities for growth. In 2019, we’ll see more of the effects of losing those journalists in our coverage, audience, and revenue, and thus begin to take on the responsibility to rebuild those pipelines together.
In the past year, journalism schools across the country have seen spikes in applications, in part due to the current administration’s campaign against reputable news organizations, the inspiring investigative work reporters do to hold powerful institutions to account, and the unprecedented reader support for news organizations. We’re seeing a rise in passionate new journalists who want to do good work, but we have too few good starting opportunities to give them.
Those of us who hire, manage, mentor, sponsor, and retain new journalists have a responsibility to make sure our staffs reflect the people we’re covering. We also need to invest in the growth of new journalists who have to navigate careers in a more precarious phase of our industry without as much experience to leverage or fall back on. Those of us who have influence in recruiting need to purposely participate in networks of applicants with a wide range of personal, educational, socioeconomic, and professional backgrounds. We need to build relationships with journalism, design, technology, and business schools or continuing education programs in different parts of the country. Those of us who manage people owe it to ourselves to foster an environment where feedback from our direct reports is encouraged and heard and to grow our management skills as much as any others we develop for our roles.
All of us can participate in professionalizing the way we recruit, particularly for entry- and middle-level journalism roles, so that the best person for the job comes from a diverse pool of candidates. All of us need to support and partner with organizations of underrepresented journalists, including NAJA, NAHJ, NLGJA, NABJ, SAJA, and AAJA.
Our society will always need a free press, which depends on future journalists staying in the profession and being able to support themselves, seek new opportunities in the field and grow in their careers. Media leaders need to commit to figuring out what sustainability means for their own institutions and carving out paths for growth that ultimately benefit their audiences. Foundations and boards need to seek out and invest in new media concepts led by smart journalists who have new ideas about what we need to cover, how, and audiences that are being overlooked.
There will never be easy solutions, but each of us has an opportunity to help bring up the next generation of journalists and pay forward the opportunities and support we received at the beginning of our careers.
Elite Truong is deputy editor for strategic initiatives at The Washington Post.
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Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
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Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
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Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
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Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
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Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
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Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
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