Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

“Grab a blanket, settle in on the couch, and get ready for a night of binge-watching fantastic journalism.”

Grab a blanket, settle in on the couch, and get ready for a night of binge-watching fantastic journalism.

With the growth of subscription video-on-demand services like Hulu, Apple TV+, Netflix, and HBO Max has come an accelerated competition between them for audience-grabbing content. The wealth of outstanding video journalism originating from traditional newsrooms has never been more poised to take over TVs everywhere.

The trend of content collaborations is already off to a promising start. In 2020, Hulu partnered with The New York Times for its well-received show The Weekly. HBO has generated headlines with its current news series with Axios and garnered awards and acclaim for its former program VICE News Tonight. Amazon Prime came out of the gate early in the streaming wars with The New Yorker Presents.

In the race to expand their market share, the platforms have poured copious money into content, from Hollywood productions to independent films to shows by online creators. Audiences in this advanced era of digital media have shown interest in a wide variety of formats, from 15-minute shorts to full-length documentaries.

As heads of newsrooms continue to search for new ways to generate revenue, the prospect of shows backed by streaming services is tantalizing. Both evergreen and up-to-the-minute news have the potential to amass large viewerships beyond proprietary platforms. Pursuing this avenue of distribution means bringing journalism to where the people are.

There will continue to be hesitancy about porting your outlet’s brand to another platform. But the benefits in outweigh the concerns and create a win-win scenario. More exclusive content brings subscribers to streaming services and puts more eyeballs on newsrooms’ work.

News consumers are the biggest winners of all. Whether they’re chillin’ at home or on the go, they’re getting great original content from the platforms that they love.

Mark S. Luckie is a digital strategist and former partnerships manager at Twitter and Facebook.

Grab a blanket, settle in on the couch, and get ready for a night of binge-watching fantastic journalism.

With the growth of subscription video-on-demand services like Hulu, Apple TV+, Netflix, and HBO Max has come an accelerated competition between them for audience-grabbing content. The wealth of outstanding video journalism originating from traditional newsrooms has never been more poised to take over TVs everywhere.

The trend of content collaborations is already off to a promising start. In 2020, Hulu partnered with The New York Times for its well-received show The Weekly. HBO has generated headlines with its current news series with Axios and garnered awards and acclaim for its former program VICE News Tonight. Amazon Prime came out of the gate early in the streaming wars with The New Yorker Presents.

In the race to expand their market share, the platforms have poured copious money into content, from Hollywood productions to independent films to shows by online creators. Audiences in this advanced era of digital media have shown interest in a wide variety of formats, from 15-minute shorts to full-length documentaries.

As heads of newsrooms continue to search for new ways to generate revenue, the prospect of shows backed by streaming services is tantalizing. Both evergreen and up-to-the-minute news have the potential to amass large viewerships beyond proprietary platforms. Pursuing this avenue of distribution means bringing journalism to where the people are.

There will continue to be hesitancy about porting your outlet’s brand to another platform. But the benefits in outweigh the concerns and create a win-win scenario. More exclusive content brings subscribers to streaming services and puts more eyeballs on newsrooms’ work.

News consumers are the biggest winners of all. Whether they’re chillin’ at home or on the go, they’re getting great original content from the platforms that they love.

Mark S. Luckie is a digital strategist and former partnerships manager at Twitter and Facebook.

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

Cory Haik   Be essential

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Jennifer Brandel   A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

J. Siguru Wahutu   Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

An Xiao Mina   2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Nikki Usher   Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

Ariane Bernard   Going solo is still only a path for the few

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front