Here’s my wish list for 2021.

We’ll find better ways to archive our work. As another year goes by in which lots of meaningful reporting risks being buried in the ever-growing heap of digital content, I’m more interested in ever in endeavors to make reporting with ongoing value more accessible. A few years back, Jonathan Groves’ writing made me think about how different journalism might look if our metrics were set around longevity rather than clicks or immediate engagement.

Many newsrooms are experimenting with new ways to make reporting with a long shelf life accessible on an ongoing basis. Podcasts have come to play that role for some news outlets. And, in my work the past couple of years at Tiller Press at Simon & Schuster, we’ve been looking at how books act as a final format for reporting — not just through the individual reporter writing a book as in-depth exploration of a subject (as the Peabody-nominated journalist Cleo Stiller did with her book Modern Manhood), but through other means of collecting reporting. To share a few examples:

• Jeff Young and the Ohio Valley ReSource team of public radio journalists operating in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio turned four years of reporting primarily through audio journalism pieces into a book called Appalachian Fall: Dispatches from Coal Country on What’s Ailing America.
• The team at Spaceship Media partnered with Advance Local, Essential Partners, and other organizations in 2018 to convene Americans with a range of opinions about guns, in person and then online, to learn from one another. Journalists following the process then published a range of articles and videos about the project, most of which appeared amidst the daily fodder of the news outlets and went quickly into the archive. We worked with the team to archive that work in a case study book of sorts, called Guns, An American Conversation: How To Bridge Political Divides.
• Michael Croley and Jack Shuler from Denison University began the Between Coasts online outlet and conferences in the wake of the 2016 election, to combat parachute journalism and to get more attention for journalists and writers based throughout the middle of the U.S., who have been living with and covering the issues faced on those places for years. This year, we published a collection of that work — about half of which had been previously published in various outlets and half of which were original to the book — called Midland: Reports from Flyover Country.

With so many newsrooms and journalists experimenting with how to make their work discoverable beyond the moment — at a time when there’s more competition for our attention than ever — I am excited to see what experiments lie ahead this year.

We’ll address the challenge of geographic diversity in journalism. Nieman Lab has been among the outlets writing with frequency about the concentration of journalism jobs within an increasingly smaller number of national metro areas. Often, we have pointed to those trends as a sign of the declining resources for local news — a particular area of focus of the research I’ve conducted with colleagues through the Tow Center for Digital Journalism over the past few years. But, to borrow a distinction Andrea Wenzel used as part of our work, that’s the “reporting for” local communities part of the problem. There’s also the “reporting about” those communities.

The model of increasing concentration into national news outlets has meant reporters based in a few metro areas have been responsible for reporting on happenings around the country. Yet Covid-19 has revealed the possibilities for people to collaborate without all working out of the same building. It’s demonstrated that news organizations can function without the physical newsroom being essential to the center of the enterprise. And that could mean more national news outlets come out of this moment being significantly more open to a distributed workforce. While there are many challenges that can come with colleagues not sharing physical space together as frequently, this change can address many issues. Having more reporting talent spread throughout the country can have a profound effect on how communities are covered, and how communities feel covered. What’s more, the range of potential talent who see the journalism industry as a possible career option will broaden if they don’t have to live in some of the most expensive housing markets in the country.

We’ll invest in meaningful online participation. As we went through a presidential election year in the midst of a pandemic, we saw people openly struggling with how to engage in civic life. Town halls and community forums were a challenge to convene. And the public has become significantly more critical of the moderation policies of commercial social network platforms.

News outlets — particularly at the local level — have new potential to play for convening meaningful civic dialogue. A couple of years back, Joe Karaganis and I partnered with a platform called Polis and the Bowling Green Daily News here in Kentucky to host the Bowling Green Civic Assembly through the American Assembly at Columbia University. Our work centered on a virtual town hall asking the question: What would need to change in the city to make it a better place to live, work, and spend time. This year, in February, we partnered with Louisville Public Media to convene a similar online conversation called The Next Louisville: Civic Assembly.

In these experiments, we’ve seen how digital platforms with a low barrier of entry and a focus on solutions-oriented discussions can facilitate meaningful dialogue. I’ve been excited to see lots of other approaches to local convening in 2020, and I hope that spirit of experimentation grows in 2021.