Equipping local journalism

“How do you absorb people’s views and the scars they’ve taken from encounters with journalism while maintaining your journalistic independence and integrity?”

The spotlight will and should remain on how to strengthen local journalism, especially how to equip local journalists with the tools they need for ambitious accountability and investigative reporting, as we’ve been trying to do at The Marshall Project. Those include data analysis; alternative storytelling tools that allow the use of video, audio, and data visualization; public records requests; audience analytics; and legal help to extract information from officials who’ve gotten used to lax oversight.

We’ll see more exploration of engagement reporting — fundamentally, how do journalists become more proactive, responsible, and respectful in interacting with the communities they write about? How do they understand what kind of information these communities feel they lack — even if that is less sexy, too often dismissed and undervalued basic service journalism that explains how systems work? How do you absorb people’s views and the scars they’ve taken from encounters with journalism while maintaining your journalistic independence and integrity?

They’re tough challenges, but they make contemporary journalism so urgent and a continuing adventure.

Susan Chira is the editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project.

The spotlight will and should remain on how to strengthen local journalism, especially how to equip local journalists with the tools they need for ambitious accountability and investigative reporting, as we’ve been trying to do at The Marshall Project. Those include data analysis; alternative storytelling tools that allow the use of video, audio, and data visualization; public records requests; audience analytics; and legal help to extract information from officials who’ve gotten used to lax oversight.

We’ll see more exploration of engagement reporting — fundamentally, how do journalists become more proactive, responsible, and respectful in interacting with the communities they write about? How do they understand what kind of information these communities feel they lack — even if that is less sexy, too often dismissed and undervalued basic service journalism that explains how systems work? How do you absorb people’s views and the scars they’ve taken from encounters with journalism while maintaining your journalistic independence and integrity?

They’re tough challenges, but they make contemporary journalism so urgent and a continuing adventure.

Susan Chira is the editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project.

Alexandra Svokos   Working harder to reach audiences where they are

David Skok   Renewed interest in human-powered reporting

Sue Cross   Thinking and acting collectively to save the news

Andrew Donohue   We’ll find out whether journalism can, indeed, save democracy

Mar Cabra   The inevitable mental health revolution

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Journalists productively harness generative AI tools

Delano Massey   The industry shakes its imposter syndrome

S. Mitra Kalita   “Everything sucks. Good luck to you.”

Bill Grueskin   Local news will come to rely on AI

Tim Carmody   Newsletter writers need a new ethics

Ryan Gantz   “I’m sorry, but I’m a large language model”

Sarah Stonbely   Growth in public funding for news and information at the state and local levels

Emily Nonko   Incarcerated reporters get more bylines

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Well-being will become a core tenet of journalism

Brian Moritz   Rebuilding the news bundle

Laxmi Parthasarathy   Unlocking the silent demand for international journalism

Joanne McNeil   Facebook and the media kiss and make up

Emma Carew Grovum   The year to resist forgetting about diversity

Hillary Frey   Death to the labor-intensive memo for prospective hires

Dominic-Madori Davis   Everyone finally realizes the need for diverse voices in tech reporting

Burt Herman   The year AI truly arrives — and with it the reckoning

Snigdha Sur   Newsrooms get nimble in a recession

Juleyka Lantigua   Newsrooms recognize women of color as the canaries in the coal mine

Eric Thurm   Journalists think of themselves as workers

Lisa Heyamoto   The independent news industry gets a roadmap to sustainability

Priyanjana Bengani   Partisan local news networks will collaborate

Susan Chira   Equipping local journalism

Moreno Cruz Osório   Brazilian journalism turns wounds into action

Nicholas Jackson   There will be launches — and we’ll keep doing the work

Pia Frey   Publishers start polling their users at scale

Kirstin McCudden   We’ll codify protection of journalism and newsgathering

Eric Holthaus   As social media fragments, marginalized voices gain more power

Karina Montoya   More reporters on the antitrust beat

Janet Haven   ChatGPT and the future of trust 

Doris Truong   Workers demand to be paid what the job is worth

Surya Mattu   Data journalists learn from photojournalists

Mael Vallejo   More threats to press freedom across the Americas

Molly de Aguiar and Mandy Van Deven   Narrative change trend brings new money to journalism

Christoph Mergerson   The rot at the core of the news business

Matt Rasnic   More newsroom workers turn to organized labor

Anthony Nadler   Confronting media gerrymandering

Jaden Amos   TikTok personality journalists continue to rise

Joni Deutsch   Podcast collaboration — not competition — breeds excellence

Jennifer Choi and Jonathan Jackson   Funders finally bet on next-generation news entrepreneurs

Josh Schwartz   The AI spammers are coming

Amethyst J. Davis   The slight of the great contraction

Martina Efeyini   Talk to Gen Z. They’re the experts of Gen Z.

Jarrad Henderson   Video editing will help people understand the media they consume

Jim Friedlich   Local journalism steps up to the challenge of civic coverage

Richard Tofel   The press might get better at vetting presidential candidates

Barbara Raab   More journalism funders will take more risks

Paul Cheung   More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs

Tre'vell Anderson   Continued culpability in anti-trans campaigns

Johannes Klingebiel   The innovation team, R.I.P.

A.J. Bauer   Covering the right wrong

Basile Simon   Towards supporting criminal accountability

Mariana Moura Santos   A woman who speaks is a woman who changes the world

Eric Ulken   Generative AI brings wrongness at scale

Eric Nuzum   A focus on people instead of power

Felicitas Carrique and Becca Aaronson   News product goes from trend to standard

Joe Amditis   AI throws a lifeline to local publishers

James Salanga   Journalists work from a place of harm reduction

Ryan Nave   Citizen journalism, but make it equitable

Errin Haines   Journalists on the campaign trail mend trust with the public

Kathy Lu   We need emotionally agile newsroom leaders

Larry Ryckman   We’ll work together with our competitors

Joshua P. Darr   Local to live, wire to wither

Simon Galperin   Philanthropy stops investing in corporate media

Tamar Charney   Flux is the new stability

Sarabeth Berman   Nonprofit local news shows that it can scale

Cari Nazeer and Emily Goligoski   News organizations step up their support for caregivers

Jim VandeHei   There is no “peak newsletter”

Esther Kezia Thorpe   Subscription pressures force product innovation

Andrew Losowsky   Journalism realizes the replacement for Twitter is not a new Twitter

Elite Truong   In platform collapse, an opportunity for community

Gordon Crovitz   The year advertisers stop funding misinformation

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Mission-driven metrics become our North Star

Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni   The future of journalism is not you

Peter Sterne   AI enters the newsroom

John Davidow   A year of intergenerational learning

Jessica Clark   Open discourse retrenches

Kavya Sukumar   Belling the cat: The rise of independent fact-checking at scale

Nicholas Thompson   The year AI actually changes the media business

Alex Perry   New paths to transparency without Twitter

Walter Frick   Journalists wake up to the power of prediction markets

Dannagal G. Young   Stop rewarding elite performances of identity threat

Stefanie Murray   The year U.S. media stops screwing around and becomes pro-democracy

Ariel Zirulnick   Journalism doubles down on user needs

Ayala Panievsky   It’s time for PR for journalism

Don Day   The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.

Alan Henry   A reckoning with why trust in news is so low

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau   More of the same

Raney Aronson-Rath   Journalists will band together to fight intimidation

Mario García   More newsrooms go mobile-first

Sam Gregory   Synthetic media forces us to understand how media gets made

J. Siguru Wahutu   American journalism reckons with its colonialist tendencies

Ben Werdmuller   The internet is up for grabs again

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-check (no, really!)

Gina Chua   The traditional story structure gets deconstructed

Cassandra Etienne   Local news fellowships will help fight newsroom inequities

Alexandra Borchardt   The year of the climate journalism strategy

Amy Schmitz Weiss   Journalism education faces a crossroads

Francesco Zaffarano   There is no end of “social media”

Danielle K. Brown and Kathleen Searles   DEI efforts must consider mental health and online abuse

AX Mina   Journalism in a time of permacrisis

Laura E. Davis   The year we embrace the robots — and ourselves

Jakob Moll   Journalism startups will think beyond English

Sarah Alvarez   Dream bigger or lose out

Rachel Glickhouse   Humanizing newsrooms will be a badge of honor

Jonas Kaiser   Rejecting the “free speech” frame

Ståle Grut   Your newsroom experiences a Midjourney-gate, too

Jennifer Brandel   AI couldn’t care less. Journalists will care more. 

Taylor Lorenz   The “creator economy” will be astroturfed

Christina Shih   Shared values move from nice-to-haves to essentials

Julia Angwin   Democracies will get serious about saving journalism

Sarah Marshall   A web channel strategy won’t be enough

Shanté Cosme   The answer to “quiet quitting” is radical empathy

Peter Bale   Rising costs force more digital innovation

Nik Usher   This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)

Parker Molloy   We’ll reach new heights of moral panic

Anna Nirmala   News organizations get new structures

Rodney Gibbs   Recalibrating how we work apart

Mauricio Cabrera   It’s no longer about audiences, it’s about communities

Cindy Royal   Yes, journalists should learn to code, but…

Sumi Aggarwal   Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development

Jenna Weiss-Berman   The economic downturn benefits the podcasting industry. (No, really!)

Jesse Holcomb   Buffeted, whipped, bullied, pulled

Khushbu Shah   Global reporting will suffer

Anika Anand   Independent news businesses lead the way on healthy work cultures

Kaitlyn Wells   We’ll prioritize media literacy for children

Jessica Maddox   Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture

Michael W. Wagner   The backlash against pro-democracy reporting is coming

Sue Robinson   Engagement journalism will have to confront a tougher reality

Sam Guzik   AI will start fact-checking. We may not like the results.

Alex Sujong Laughlin   Credit where it’s due

Dana Lacey   Tech will screw publishers over

Victor Pickard   The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce

Jody Brannon   We’ll embrace policy remedies

Brian Stelter   Finding new ways to reach news avoiders

Cory Bergman   The AI content flood

Michael Schudson   Journalism gets more and more difficult

Zizi Papacharissi   Platforms are over

Kaitlin C. Miller   Harassment in journalism won’t get better, but we’ll talk about it more openly

Leezel Tanglao   Community partnerships drive better reporting

Kerri Hoffman   Podcasting goes local

Upasna Gautam   Technology that performs at the speed of news

Ryan Kellett   Airline-like loyalty programs try to tie down news readers

Al Lucca   Digital news design gets interesting again

Gabe Schneider   Well-funded journalism leaders stop making disparate pay

Anita Varma   Journalism prioritizes the basic need for survival

Wilson Liévano   Diaspora journalism takes the next step

David Cohn   AI made this prediction

Julia Beizer   News fatigue shows us a clear path forward

Masuma Ahuja   Journalism starts working for and with its communities

Daniel Trielli   Trust in news will continue to fall. Just look at Brazil.

Sue Schardt   Toward a new poetics of journalism

Jacob L. Nelson   Despite it all, people will still want to be journalists