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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.

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

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

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

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

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

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

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

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

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

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

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

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

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

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

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

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

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

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

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

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

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

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

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

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

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

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

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

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

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

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

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

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

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

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

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Hearken   Pivot to people

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

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

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

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

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

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

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

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

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

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

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

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

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

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

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

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

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

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

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

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

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

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

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

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

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

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

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

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

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

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

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

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

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

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

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

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

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

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

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

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

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

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

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

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

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

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

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

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

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

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