Tech companies get aggressive in local

“The platforms will target audio, local news, and frictionless subscriptions as areas ripe for innovation.”

1. 2021 will be a turning point for local journalism — but not as we’ve known it. The relentless shuttering of local newspapers will continue, but in parallel a handful of tech-savvy mobile apps — Citizen, Nextdoor, News Break, SmartNews — will raise substantial funding and aggressively close out a process of creative destruction sweeping the industry, opening across all major American cities and encroaching on new overseas markets.

2. YouTube and Spotify will find themselves on a collision course as podcasting and video converge. Spotify will encourage its stars to follow Joe Rogan’s lead in shooting videos of popular podcasts but providing them exclusively to Spotify. YouTube will push podcast versions of its creators’ videos. Apple will start to flex its muscle, too, engaging more aggressively in the podcast-plus-video space, getting stars from Apple TV+ to spin off audio shows and creating a premium tier for podcasts.

3. Apple, Facebook, and Google will push the boundaries of news innovation, building on the launches of Apple News+, Facebook News, and Google News Showcase. This will force all major publishers to assess their relationships with the tech behemoths, and seek to negotiate deals that both safeguard and benefit their brands. The platforms will target audio, local news, and frictionless subscriptions as areas ripe for innovation.

Edward Roussel is the chief innovation officer for Dow Jones.

1. 2021 will be a turning point for local journalism — but not as we’ve known it. The relentless shuttering of local newspapers will continue, but in parallel a handful of tech-savvy mobile apps — Citizen, Nextdoor, News Break, SmartNews — will raise substantial funding and aggressively close out a process of creative destruction sweeping the industry, opening across all major American cities and encroaching on new overseas markets.

2. YouTube and Spotify will find themselves on a collision course as podcasting and video converge. Spotify will encourage its stars to follow Joe Rogan’s lead in shooting videos of popular podcasts but providing them exclusively to Spotify. YouTube will push podcast versions of its creators’ videos. Apple will start to flex its muscle, too, engaging more aggressively in the podcast-plus-video space, getting stars from Apple TV+ to spin off audio shows and creating a premium tier for podcasts.

3. Apple, Facebook, and Google will push the boundaries of news innovation, building on the launches of Apple News+, Facebook News, and Google News Showcase. This will force all major publishers to assess their relationships with the tech behemoths, and seek to negotiate deals that both safeguard and benefit their brands. The platforms will target audio, local news, and frictionless subscriptions as areas ripe for innovation.

Edward Roussel is the chief innovation officer for Dow Jones.

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

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

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

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

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

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

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

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

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

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

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

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

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

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

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

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

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

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

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

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

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

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

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

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

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

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

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

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

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

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

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

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

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

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

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

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

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

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

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

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

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

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

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

Cory Haik   Be essential

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

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

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

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

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

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

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

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

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

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

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

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

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

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

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

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

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

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it