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

TikTok without generational prejudice

“Don’t go on a platform if you have nothing to say on it. News organizations’ success on TikTok will depend on our effort to understand the audience populating that platform.”

The next person who tells me how The Washington Post is funny on TikTok

Don’t get me wrong — they are funny. It’s one of the experiments on a social platform I was most interested in this year. But in this industry, there’s a risk every time someone has a successful idea that everyone else will just try to replicate it. And frankly, I don’t want to find ourselves spending 2020 brainstorming ways to make the morning meeting hilarious because boomers think that’s the way to talk to Gen Z.

When I first heard about what the Post was doing on TikTok, I thought: Great idea! It’s refreshing to see a legacy organization accepting the challenges of a new platform while more or less everyone else is shying away. Dave Jorgenson, the Post’s face on TikTok, developed the right voice and crafted a series of my-parents-on-the-internet videos to show what’s like to work in a newspaper (kind of). It’s a brilliant way to make a 142-year-old paper relatable, and it’s working for the Post — but that doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone else.

I’ve spent enough time in newsrooms to know the standard criticism: “But where is the journalism in The Washington Post’s TikTok?”

Well, I don’t think that’s the point — as Jorgenson explained on Axios’ Pro Rata podcast, they’re currently focused on building a loyal audience on a platform that has a billion monthly active users while waiting for new features more friendly to journalism (like the ability to swipe to a link to an articles).

Right now, I’m not even concerned about when or if they’ll figure out a way to monetize it. What I am worried about are all the copycat outlets ready to land on TikTok thinking that Post-like videos are the only way to make news appealing to a younger audience. If we all start making a trend out of the Post example, the risk is to patronize youngsters according to the stereotype that Gen Z doesn’t care about the news.

In order to build a real community, the golden rule of social media is eternal: Don’t go on a platform if you have nothing to say on it. News organizations’ success on TikTok will depend on our effort to understand the audience populating that platform.

2020 will be the year more publishers play around with lipsync and filters. But I hope we’ll also spend more time asking Gen Zers what they really want from us. I’ll definitely try my best.

Francesco Zaffarano is senior social media editor of The Telegraph.

The next person who tells me how The Washington Post is funny on TikTok

Don’t get me wrong — they are funny. It’s one of the experiments on a social platform I was most interested in this year. But in this industry, there’s a risk every time someone has a successful idea that everyone else will just try to replicate it. And frankly, I don’t want to find ourselves spending 2020 brainstorming ways to make the morning meeting hilarious because boomers think that’s the way to talk to Gen Z.

When I first heard about what the Post was doing on TikTok, I thought: Great idea! It’s refreshing to see a legacy organization accepting the challenges of a new platform while more or less everyone else is shying away. Dave Jorgenson, the Post’s face on TikTok, developed the right voice and crafted a series of my-parents-on-the-internet videos to show what’s like to work in a newspaper (kind of). It’s a brilliant way to make a 142-year-old paper relatable, and it’s working for the Post — but that doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone else.

I’ve spent enough time in newsrooms to know the standard criticism: “But where is the journalism in The Washington Post’s TikTok?”

Well, I don’t think that’s the point — as Jorgenson explained on Axios’ Pro Rata podcast, they’re currently focused on building a loyal audience on a platform that has a billion monthly active users while waiting for new features more friendly to journalism (like the ability to swipe to a link to an articles).

Right now, I’m not even concerned about when or if they’ll figure out a way to monetize it. What I am worried about are all the copycat outlets ready to land on TikTok thinking that Post-like videos are the only way to make news appealing to a younger audience. If we all start making a trend out of the Post example, the risk is to patronize youngsters according to the stereotype that Gen Z doesn’t care about the news.

In order to build a real community, the golden rule of social media is eternal: Don’t go on a platform if you have nothing to say on it. News organizations’ success on TikTok will depend on our effort to understand the audience populating that platform.

2020 will be the year more publishers play around with lipsync and filters. But I hope we’ll also spend more time asking Gen Zers what they really want from us. I’ll definitely try my best.

Francesco Zaffarano is senior social media editor of The Telegraph.

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

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

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

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

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

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

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

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

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

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

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Nikki Usher   All systems down

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

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

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

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

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

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

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

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

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

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

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

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

Millie Tran   Wicked

Mario García   Think small (screen)

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

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

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context

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

Marie Gilot   This is fine

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

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

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

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

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

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

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

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

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

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

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

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

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

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

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

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

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

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

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

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

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

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

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

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

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

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

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

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

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

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4