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 future of journalism is collaborative

“We’ve seen the ideas, creativity, and power that is generated when journalists, communicators, and designers are gathered to work on projects combining their skills and their different perspectives.”

Last year, when I was asked to contribute a prediction here, I mentioned that we in journalism would be looking more at our social impact than our total pageviews or other metrics. This year, working with Chicas Poderosas in Latin America and witnessing all that’s going on in the region, I believe the path to generating that social impact journalism should strive for is community and collaboration.

Though the journalist’s job has been traditionally seen as a lonely one, focused on competition for bylines or scoops, the realities of the industry and the world open the door to a new, more collaborative way of doing journalism.

In a scenario where news outlets continue to close, newsrooms continue to shrink, and journalists remain expected to do more with less, cooperation between journalists and/or newsrooms offers the possibility of improved coverage, the chance to tackle important issues with a more complex approach, and of learning and exchanging experiences.

Social protests, the rise of feminist struggles, and migrations going in the region show us that, to cover current affairs, we need more dynamic approaches. We need teams that gather different skills and expertise, that are more diverse, and we need a regional reach to fully tell the story.

The possibilities provided by collaboration are endless. We’ve seen it with regional projects that have helped uncover corruption. In 2019, at Chicas Poderosas, we’ve witnessed it first hand. In the mediathons we held in Argentina, Colombia, and México, we’ve seen the ideas, creativity, and power that is generated when journalists, communicators, and designers are gathered to work on projects combining their skills and their different perspectives — provided by their socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnic origins, age, and training. Stories get generated that offer a different perspective, which pose new questions and provide a more complex understanding of issues. In a regional investigation we created with 11 reporters to tell the stories of migration and non-binary people in Latin America, we’ve seen the possibility of creating new narratives that question traditional stories, include more questions, and provide new perspectives of how journalism processes can happen.

In 2020, we’re excited to see where the paths of collaboration take us, what we can create with this approach, and how these practices are replicated. But there’s one thing I’m certain about: The future of journalism is collaborative.

Mariana Santos is founder and CEO of Chicas Poderosas.

Last year, when I was asked to contribute a prediction here, I mentioned that we in journalism would be looking more at our social impact than our total pageviews or other metrics. This year, working with Chicas Poderosas in Latin America and witnessing all that’s going on in the region, I believe the path to generating that social impact journalism should strive for is community and collaboration.

Though the journalist’s job has been traditionally seen as a lonely one, focused on competition for bylines or scoops, the realities of the industry and the world open the door to a new, more collaborative way of doing journalism.

In a scenario where news outlets continue to close, newsrooms continue to shrink, and journalists remain expected to do more with less, cooperation between journalists and/or newsrooms offers the possibility of improved coverage, the chance to tackle important issues with a more complex approach, and of learning and exchanging experiences.

Social protests, the rise of feminist struggles, and migrations going in the region show us that, to cover current affairs, we need more dynamic approaches. We need teams that gather different skills and expertise, that are more diverse, and we need a regional reach to fully tell the story.

The possibilities provided by collaboration are endless. We’ve seen it with regional projects that have helped uncover corruption. In 2019, at Chicas Poderosas, we’ve witnessed it first hand. In the mediathons we held in Argentina, Colombia, and México, we’ve seen the ideas, creativity, and power that is generated when journalists, communicators, and designers are gathered to work on projects combining their skills and their different perspectives — provided by their socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnic origins, age, and training. Stories get generated that offer a different perspective, which pose new questions and provide a more complex understanding of issues. In a regional investigation we created with 11 reporters to tell the stories of migration and non-binary people in Latin America, we’ve seen the possibility of creating new narratives that question traditional stories, include more questions, and provide new perspectives of how journalism processes can happen.

In 2020, we’re excited to see where the paths of collaboration take us, what we can create with this approach, and how these practices are replicated. But there’s one thing I’m certain about: The future of journalism is collaborative.

Mariana Santos is founder and CEO of Chicas Poderosas.

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

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

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

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

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

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

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

Mario García   Think small (screen)

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

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

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

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

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Marie Gilot   This is fine

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

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

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

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

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

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

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

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

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

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

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

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

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

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

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

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

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

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

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

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

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

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

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

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

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

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

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

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

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

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

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

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

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

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

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

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

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

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

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

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

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

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

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

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

Nikki Usher   All systems down

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Millie Tran   Wicked

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

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

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context