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

Trade “politics” for “power”

“It’s not just a matter of semantics: The ways journalists decide what they cover — and how they think about the shape of that coverage — has an impact on the world.”

In 2020, it will be time to review what newsrooms consider a breaking-news event. An election result or a major change in government might deserve a push notification sent to thousands or millions of phones, sure — but so might news related to an environmental or social issue, even if it doesn’t fit into “breaking” norms or the traditional navigation bars of many news websites (“National,” “International,” “Politics,” “Business,” “Sports,” and so on).

Rethinking breaking news can trigger emerging reflexes in media organizations. On the French-language digital news site Contexte, there’s no “Politics” section. The term used instead is “Power,” which embraces institutional power, political power, lobbying, and all other kind of power you can imagine in the European landscape. Young people know what the word “power” means — and I suspect they can connect with it better than a fusty old-fashioned label like “politics.”

It’s not just a matter of semantics: The ways journalists decide what they cover — and how they think about the shape of that coverage — has an impact on the world. An idea like “power” can more directly include millennials’ top concerns, like climate change and income inequality.

One might say that these shifts in coverage are a business strategy to better connect with younger audiences. But it’s also a sign of the management in media outlets meaningfully shifting. While editors struggle to innovate and find new sources of revenue, they’re more than ever aware of the gap between legacy news brands and young people. To simplify, news brands see news as what the public should know, whereas young audiences see news as what is useful to know, what is interesting to know, or what is fun to know. Here’s hoping a few new shapes of news can help close that gap in 2020.

Alice Antheaume is executive dean of the Sciences Po Journalism School in Paris.

In 2020, it will be time to review what newsrooms consider a breaking-news event. An election result or a major change in government might deserve a push notification sent to thousands or millions of phones, sure — but so might news related to an environmental or social issue, even if it doesn’t fit into “breaking” norms or the traditional navigation bars of many news websites (“National,” “International,” “Politics,” “Business,” “Sports,” and so on).

Rethinking breaking news can trigger emerging reflexes in media organizations. On the French-language digital news site Contexte, there’s no “Politics” section. The term used instead is “Power,” which embraces institutional power, political power, lobbying, and all other kind of power you can imagine in the European landscape. Young people know what the word “power” means — and I suspect they can connect with it better than a fusty old-fashioned label like “politics.”

It’s not just a matter of semantics: The ways journalists decide what they cover — and how they think about the shape of that coverage — has an impact on the world. An idea like “power” can more directly include millennials’ top concerns, like climate change and income inequality.

One might say that these shifts in coverage are a business strategy to better connect with younger audiences. But it’s also a sign of the management in media outlets meaningfully shifting. While editors struggle to innovate and find new sources of revenue, they’re more than ever aware of the gap between legacy news brands and young people. To simplify, news brands see news as what the public should know, whereas young audiences see news as what is useful to know, what is interesting to know, or what is fun to know. Here’s hoping a few new shapes of news can help close that gap in 2020.

Alice Antheaume is executive dean of the Sciences Po Journalism School in Paris.

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

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

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

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

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

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

Marie Gilot   This is fine

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

Nikki Usher   All systems down

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

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

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

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

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

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

Millie Tran   Wicked

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

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

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

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

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

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

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

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

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

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

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

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

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

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

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

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

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

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

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

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

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

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

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

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

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

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

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

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

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

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

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

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

Mario García   Think small (screen)

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

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

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

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

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

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation