2019 will be the year when both journalists and their audiences will finally understand that most numbers we see in the media aren’t precise, but often come surrounded by a fuzzy cloud of uncertainty. We’ll all accept that this is just the way the world works. We may even come up with good ways to visualize this cloud.
In 2019, readers won’t feel anxious when seeing a needle that swings based on random jittering. Also, journalists will stop reporting tiny variations of indicators that aren’t very accurate to begin with without putting them in their historical context.
In 2019, we’ll all grasp that a 15 percent chance of something happening isn’t 0 percent, as any seasoned Dungeons & Dragons fan can tell you. It’s roughly the equivalent of rolling a 1 — or any other single number — on a six-sided die. A 30 percent chance is the chance of scoring 5 or 6 when rolling for damage with a short sword, enough to kill a goblin before it strikes back.
In 2019, most people will finally be able to read the National Hurricane Center’s cone of uncertainty as a range of possible paths of the center of a storm, and not as an area under threat.
In 2019, opinion editors will chastise columnists who still think that “error” in statistics is synonymous with “mistake,” or that the fact that all forecast models are uncertain means that all models are wrong. These editors will grasp that statistical uncertainty is always connected to a confidence level, and that the fact that many independent and uncertain models point in a similar direction should increase the confidence we have in them.
In 2019, we’ll all learn to be less certain about our beliefs. We may even pay attention to cognitive psychologists who explain that the best way to become aware of our knowledge gaps is to try to explain our opinions to others without taking logical leaps or relying on arguments from authority. We’ll be humbled by our many failures at these attempts.
Needless to say, I don’t have full confidence in any of these predictions, but I do hope they’ll become true.
Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami.
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Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
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Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
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Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
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Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
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J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
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Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
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Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
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Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
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Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
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Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
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Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote