There’s always a little wishful thinking in these annual forecasts — or a dose of gloom. Here’s what I wish the journalism industry would do in 2024 to tackle some of its underlying problems that are within its power to fix and to create more sustainable journalism businesses.

• News planning. I have long believed this area is ripe for improvement to increase efficiency, cut costs, and ensure we produce more of what will be read and beneficial to users. There is still far too much vanity publishing or fire-and-forget reporting that may meet the egotistical needs of reporters or editors but not the needs of readers or your businesses. It starts with understanding your business model (advertising or subscription or a combination of the two) and thinking about content that serves those models and your customers. What do people actually provably engage with and value? And which business objective does that content serve: clicks as a proxy for advertising, or engagement as a proxy for subscriber loyalty or propensity to subscribe? Do more of what pulls those levers and cut what doesn’t. (The Guardian cut more than 25% of its headlines and experienced a dramatic rise in engagement. Reporters produced more of what worked and less of what didn’t.)
• Work flow. Understand how much time you’re committing to specific reporting projects, including research or establishing whether a story is really worth doing. Adopt off-the-shelf workflow tools to describe reporting projects, pitch them to editors, get specific permission to work on them, and track progress between conception, commissioning, working, and publishing — including collaboration with others. Consider checklists to ensure you tackle simple but important questions, like whether you need other assets from others to do the work, whether you need the help of other reporters, and who it’s being written for. Is it worth doing at all?
• Product thinking. It’s not just for the product team: Consider each story as a product which must meet specific needs to inform, entertain, and educate — to borrow the BBC motto. Does the story have links to enrich it? Is the context clear? Does the article explain your expertise and sourcing? We know all of this adds up towards your score on trust.

All these are relatively simple and in your power to control. They involve a little collaboration and putting some framework around what we think we do spontaneously without realizing how much of our resources we waste in poor planning and poor execution of stories that could be better…or were better not done at all.