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You can’t raise prices forever

“The last five years of raising subscription prices will begin to slow down as newspaper executives begin to notice even their most loyal subscribers have a price they will not pay.”

The legacy newspaper organizations’ trouble will continue as they struggle with the demands of implementing difficult digital-first strategies as their print business continues to erode. The last five years of raising subscription prices will begin to slow down as newspaper executives begin to notice even their most loyal subscribers have a price they will not pay — and they notice their current circulation is still a solid audience to sell to advertisers.

The growing need for quality community journalism will continue to drive entrepreneurial work to fill in the gaps left by legacy news groups and their cost-cutting moves. More independent, local journalism efforts will launch than ever before, both online and print, with a surprising uplift of local business advertising supporting the efforts to create healthy local journalism efforts. Community-supported journalism will have a good year.

A commitment to building awareness and content distribution outside the hold of Facebook will give NextDoor a tremendous opportunity to provide local journalists with a platform for engagement and news dissemination — before, succumbing to the needs of its investors, it goes crazy and messes it up, too.

Finally, the pivot-to-digital-agency strategy will be buried next to its ugly cousin pivot-to-video by the end of 2019.

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

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

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

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

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

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

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

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

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

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

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

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

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

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

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

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

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

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

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

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

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

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

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

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

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

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

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

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

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

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

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

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

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

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

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

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

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

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

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

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

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

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

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

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

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

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

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

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

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

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

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

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

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

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

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

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

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

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

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

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

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

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

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

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

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

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

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

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

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

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

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

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

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

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

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

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

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

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

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

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

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

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

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Hearken   Pivot to people

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

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