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

Use the tools of journalism to save it

“It’s hard work, but democracy is at stake. We’ve exhausted all the magic incantations the internet has to offer.”

Here’s the bad news: No one is coming to save you. No business is going to swoop in and provide sustainable funding for newsrooms. No new technology is going to transform the way journalism supports itself forever. No big, incredible deal is going to build a strong foundation for the news. There isn’t a single magic bullet that will work for everyone. Even producing groundbreaking journalism isn’t going to suddenly turn your fortunes around.

But journalism is the bedrock of democracy. We need it more than ever. In 2020, for many of the most vulnerable communities in our society, high-quality journalism that shares their lived experiences will be their only lifeline. For many of the businesses whose work undermines our democratic freedoms, journalism that uncovers their corruption will be the only voices holding their feet to the flames.

Here’s the good news: Newsrooms will win. Not through radical innovation, not through magical thinking — but by taking a laser-focused approach to optimizing what they already do.

It takes a radical culture shift. The internet isn’t a broadcast medium — it’s a conversation. Instead of thinking in terms of having an audience, you need to think about building and serving a community. Instead of informing, you need to be listening. The opportunities to learn the nuances of your community and to serve it directly are unprecedented — but it takes work.

Journalists have been listening, digging up facts, and learning through empathy forever. Along with doing this work in order to report on great stories, they need to do this to holistically learn more about the people in their communities. Who are they? What do their lives look like? What do they need from your journalism? How can you serve them better? Don’t assume you know the answers — you need to go out and talk to them. Not once, but continuously. Any business that doesn’t proactively talk to its customers as its beating heart will fail.

Once you understand your community, you can rapidly test hypotheses about what your business can be. It’s not just about what your community wants; you need to intersect that demand with what you can feasibly provide, and a model that will serve as the center of a viable business. Test all three, in quick succession, with real members of your community. Make small changes based on the feedback you receive, and do it over and over again. Don’t speculate about the answers; find them out from people who know. Your community knows what it wants. Experts can help you with viable business models and feasibility questions. Just reach out and ask. Use the tools of journalism to save journalism.

There are no shortcuts. The past is littered with warnings from newsrooms that embraced quick-fix solutions peddled by vendors to suit their own agendas. Whether it’s pivoting to video, leaping head first into the blockchain, or making devil’s bargains with social networking companies, there’s no alternative to measuring the right things, talking to your community, and testing sustainable approaches to revenue. Because every community is different, nothing will definitely work for yours. The only way to find out is to do the legwork. The newsrooms that don’t will disappear.

The good news is that help is available. Hearken has been helping newsrooms listen to their communities for years. Matter — where I cut my teeth — provides human-centered bootcamps for news organizations. You don’t have to do it alone — but you do have to do it.

It’s hard work, but democracy is at stake. We’ve exhausted all the magic incantations the internet has to offer. In 2020, it’s time to get back down to business.

Ben Werdmuller is a product developer and former San Francisco director of investments at Matter.

Here’s the bad news: No one is coming to save you. No business is going to swoop in and provide sustainable funding for newsrooms. No new technology is going to transform the way journalism supports itself forever. No big, incredible deal is going to build a strong foundation for the news. There isn’t a single magic bullet that will work for everyone. Even producing groundbreaking journalism isn’t going to suddenly turn your fortunes around.

But journalism is the bedrock of democracy. We need it more than ever. In 2020, for many of the most vulnerable communities in our society, high-quality journalism that shares their lived experiences will be their only lifeline. For many of the businesses whose work undermines our democratic freedoms, journalism that uncovers their corruption will be the only voices holding their feet to the flames.

Here’s the good news: Newsrooms will win. Not through radical innovation, not through magical thinking — but by taking a laser-focused approach to optimizing what they already do.

It takes a radical culture shift. The internet isn’t a broadcast medium — it’s a conversation. Instead of thinking in terms of having an audience, you need to think about building and serving a community. Instead of informing, you need to be listening. The opportunities to learn the nuances of your community and to serve it directly are unprecedented — but it takes work.

Journalists have been listening, digging up facts, and learning through empathy forever. Along with doing this work in order to report on great stories, they need to do this to holistically learn more about the people in their communities. Who are they? What do their lives look like? What do they need from your journalism? How can you serve them better? Don’t assume you know the answers — you need to go out and talk to them. Not once, but continuously. Any business that doesn’t proactively talk to its customers as its beating heart will fail.

Once you understand your community, you can rapidly test hypotheses about what your business can be. It’s not just about what your community wants; you need to intersect that demand with what you can feasibly provide, and a model that will serve as the center of a viable business. Test all three, in quick succession, with real members of your community. Make small changes based on the feedback you receive, and do it over and over again. Don’t speculate about the answers; find them out from people who know. Your community knows what it wants. Experts can help you with viable business models and feasibility questions. Just reach out and ask. Use the tools of journalism to save journalism.

There are no shortcuts. The past is littered with warnings from newsrooms that embraced quick-fix solutions peddled by vendors to suit their own agendas. Whether it’s pivoting to video, leaping head first into the blockchain, or making devil’s bargains with social networking companies, there’s no alternative to measuring the right things, talking to your community, and testing sustainable approaches to revenue. Because every community is different, nothing will definitely work for yours. The only way to find out is to do the legwork. The newsrooms that don’t will disappear.

The good news is that help is available. Hearken has been helping newsrooms listen to their communities for years. Matter — where I cut my teeth — provides human-centered bootcamps for news organizations. You don’t have to do it alone — but you do have to do it.

It’s hard work, but democracy is at stake. We’ve exhausted all the magic incantations the internet has to offer. In 2020, it’s time to get back down to business.

Ben Werdmuller is a product developer and former San Francisco director of investments at Matter.

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

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

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

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

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

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

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

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

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

AX Mina   The Forum we wanted, the forum we got

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

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

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

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

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Carrie Brown   Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

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

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

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

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

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

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

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

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

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Millie Tran   Wicked

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

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

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

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

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

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

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

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

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

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

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

Nik Usher   All systems down

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

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

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

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

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

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

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

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

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

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

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

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

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context

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

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Marie Gilot   This is fine

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

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

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Mario García   Think small (screen)

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

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

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

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

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

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

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful