Obvious but newsy: Consolidation is coming. Vice, BuzzFeed, and Vox Media are all looking at their balance sheets and don’t have the numbers they would want to IPO. There’s some chatter that they will attempt to merge, but that just seems like compounding an existing problem of too much overhead and not enough revenue.
There will have to be layoffs in non-core areas. Perhaps BuzzFeed will have to pare back on some of its more ambitious news gathering and coverage. Let’s hope not.
The biggest albatross is that big media companies like Disney (focused on fighting Netflix) and NBCUniversal (not sure what they’re focused on!) aren’t buying. Four years ago, if you were a BuzzFeed or a Vox, you’d just eye NBC as your exit path. Now that story isn’t as attractive.
Even worse is that if the most promising startups are getting passed on, what happens to the small fries? Mic, Refinery29, Mashable — that ilk— will all have to make some hard decisions (and some already have, as we’ve seen).
I know everyone is saying it’s the year of the podcast, and sure, whatever, maybe. I think it won’t be the actual year of the podcast until someone builds the analytics system to give proper ROI tracking to advertisers. Right now, ad dollars going to podcasts are nothing compared to traditional and digital ad spend. Prove to brands you’re delivering customers and high listen-through rates (beyond the existing “enter the promo code for X podcast on our brand website”) and the ad dollars will really come.
Right now, it’s brand advertising. We need someone to create the AdSense of podcasts. Scale works!
Mike Isaac is a technology reporter for The New York Times.
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Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
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Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
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Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
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Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
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Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
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Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
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Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
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Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
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Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
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A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
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
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
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Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
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Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
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Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
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Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
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Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
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Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
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Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
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Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
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Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
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Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
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Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
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Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
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Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
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Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
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Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
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