20200
P
1
20100
R  E
2
2070
D   I   C
3
2050
T   I   O   N
4
2040
S   F   O   R   J
5
2030
O  U  R  N  A  L
6
2020
I  S  M  2  0  2  0
7

The year we kill the news article

“A one-size-fits-all approach fits no one in the end. It places a heavy burden on the reader/viewer/listener/user to do the work of sifting through the story and mapping it to other relevant content and information.”

This year, we retire the news article as the default unit of journalism. It had a good run, but it’s a relic of distribution, audience, and revenue models that no longer function the way they used to.

A one-size-fits-all approach fits no one in the end. It places a heavy burden on the reader/viewer/listener/user to do the work of sifting through the story and mapping it to other relevant content and information. It asks our audience to identify the new information and skim over the old. To formulate the right questions to find the context they need to understand a new development, or to get up to speed on an ongoing issue. To rely on social headlines and teaser text to accurately assess whether a piece is worth their time.

This year, we’ll continue to see forward-thinking outlets discard the news article in favor of more dynamic formats that place the individual at the center of the story and news product. We’ll better understand a person’s shifting needs throughout the day and mold our stories and story selection to those moments. We’ll improve our reputation by improving our approach. Audiences will learn to trust us more because we will transparently strive to serve them better, and we will listen when they speak.

Successful news organizations will adopt a more nimble product approach — building a culture and habit of quick experimentation and establishing that expectation with readership, opening channels for conversations about those experiments and how they might improve. Our readers will feel like they’re a part of the process, not a part of the product.

Emily Withrow is director of R&D at Quartz.

This year, we retire the news article as the default unit of journalism. It had a good run, but it’s a relic of distribution, audience, and revenue models that no longer function the way they used to.

A one-size-fits-all approach fits no one in the end. It places a heavy burden on the reader/viewer/listener/user to do the work of sifting through the story and mapping it to other relevant content and information. It asks our audience to identify the new information and skim over the old. To formulate the right questions to find the context they need to understand a new development, or to get up to speed on an ongoing issue. To rely on social headlines and teaser text to accurately assess whether a piece is worth their time.

This year, we’ll continue to see forward-thinking outlets discard the news article in favor of more dynamic formats that place the individual at the center of the story and news product. We’ll better understand a person’s shifting needs throughout the day and mold our stories and story selection to those moments. We’ll improve our reputation by improving our approach. Audiences will learn to trust us more because we will transparently strive to serve them better, and we will listen when they speak.

Successful news organizations will adopt a more nimble product approach — building a culture and habit of quick experimentation and establishing that expectation with readership, opening channels for conversations about those experiments and how they might improve. Our readers will feel like they’re a part of the process, not a part of the product.

Emily Withrow is director of R&D at Quartz.

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

A.J. Bauer   A fork in the road for conservative media

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

Kourtney Bitterly   Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation

Rachel Davis Mersey   The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Joshua P. Darr   All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse

Mario García   Think small (screen)

Bill Adair   A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

J. Siguru Wahutu   Western journalists, learn from your African peers

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Jim Brady   We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

Nicholas Jackson   What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The business we want, not the business we had

Lucas Graves   A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

Joanne McNeil   A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

Kevin D. Grant   The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth

Errin Haines   Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz   News coverage gets geo-fragmented

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Power to the people (on your audience team)

Zizi Papacharissi   A president leads, the press follows, reality fades

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

Matt DeRienzo   Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Laura E. Davis   Know the context your journalism is operating within

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

John Garrett   It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

Irving Washington   Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

Carrie Brown-Smith   Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

Cory Haik   We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Raney Aronson-Rath   News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions

An Xiao Mina   The Forum we wanted, the forum we got

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Margarita Noriega   The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

Marie Gilot   This is fine

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

Nico Gendron   Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

M. Scott Havens   First-party data becomes media’s most important currency

Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker   A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech

Linda Solomon Wood   Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal

Christa Scharfenberg   It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Dannagal G. Young   Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart

Nikki Usher   All systems down

Millie Tran   Wicked

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb   Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management