This year, more newsrooms will recognize and address their blind spots. We’ve all got ’em, and if you think you don’t, you’re walking around with toilet paper stuck to your shoe. Here are three categories of blind spots I have and am working on.
First are your red-hot, urgent, and obvious blind spots. Pew has reported once again that journalism gets an F in representation. If we want a C-minus, we have to start immediately — and don’t skip this section if you don’t have any open positions right now, because the work starts well before you’re actually hiring. One million years ago, the inimitable Lam Thuy Vo wrote this guide to building a diverse newsroom. Here’s a CJR one from only half a million years ago.
Why will newsrooms do this in 2019? Maybe because they didn’t do it in 2017 or in 2018. But having a diverse newsroom is part of how you get an honest look at the world, and that’s theoretically what we’re doing here in the news business.
More pressingly (or depressingly), newsrooms will get on it because there’s building public pressure, and because it’s increasingly plain that representation is a huge issue. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it’ll be if the Oscars figure out the importance of diversity before newsrooms do? Come on. Click the guides above! Start now! The Oscars are in March and there’s no telling what they’ll do!
Better reason to start now: It takes time and effort. It took me a couple of years of active work in this department before results started catching up to my intentions.
Then there are your slow-burn, death-by-dogma blind spots — newsrooms have been proudly divorced from their economic engines forever, and much has already been written about this, too. But getting to build a membership program for my newsroom and understanding how and why it worked gave me a new feeling of agency and accomplishment. I was able to align the money with the mission. But first I had to be involved.
More newspaper reporters are tweeting about why people should subscribe. This is a good start, because it’s a first step into the larger world of a more active role in the business model. Whether your newsroom is subscription-based or donation-based, for-profit or nonprofit, you should be following things like the Membership Puzzle Project and the American Press Institute’s research on why people pay for news. Then do what journalists do — combine research and curiosity with determination and civic-mindedness to make an impact.
Why will newsrooms do this in 2019? Well, the other option is going out of business. And that’s gotta go out of style at some point, right?
And there are important blind spots people don’t talk about as much. We in the news industry are notoriously bad at good business practices. Management, training, and company culture. Learning and implementing new processes for getting things done. Testing. Communicating internally.
You know, acting like we’re professionals.
We’ve learned over the years to file right at deadline, then hop to the next story or project. We’re missing processes that should start before and after projects. I should thank media design genius Hong Qu for pointing me to Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy, which was my own first step into learning how and why Denverite’s products worked and didn’t work for our readers. New York Times/Texas Tribune veteran Tim Griggs recommended Amy Jo Kim’s Game Thinking, which is giving me a lot to think about as I try to make our products better for readers and members.
(Reminder: I’m an editor! This advice is for everybody in the newsroom!)
And my colleague Brian Boyer recommended Start With Why by Simon Sinek and Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke. Both have improved the way I think about communicating with my team, making sure we’re working on stuff that is rewarding, building toward a sustainable future and putting colleagues in a position to succeed.
These books, it has to be said, are the kinds of things that most journalists I know recoil from. They’re not written for us, generally speaking. But neither is basically anything you FOIA. Get over it. Get into it.
Why do I think newsrooms will work on all of these things in 2019? I lied! I predict most won’t. Frankly, I bet a lot of people clicked away somewhere in the representation section. But if your newsroom takes action now, I predict it’ll outperform those that don’t.
Dave Burdick is the editor of Denverite.
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Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
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John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
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John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
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Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
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A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
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Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
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Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
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Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
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Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
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Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
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Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
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Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
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Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
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Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure