Predictions for Journalism 2019 » Collections » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

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Predictions for Journalism 2019

Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and digital media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Here’s what they had to say.

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Celeste LeCompte
Local news needs local conversation to survive

Candis Callison
Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Mariana Moura Santos
From pageviews to impact

“Readers facing big issues will crave actionable perspectives.”

Almar Latour
Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

“In 2019, horizontal scrollytelling will feel stale and old. Vertical Storys will be all the rage.”

Ole Reißmann
The rise of vertical storytelling

“Some public-minded publications are beginning to sound like an NPR station during pledge week: An increasing amount of the work they produce seems to be about how important and vital it is that they continue to produce work.”

Gabriel Snyder
Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

“Much of the news currently published online is simply not worth paying for. Some of it is hardly worth our fleeting attention, let alone hard-earned cash.”

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue

“The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free.”

Tim Carmody, Unlocking the commons

“Reporters will use emerging technologies, new workflows, and input from their audiences to catch mistakes before they hit the web.”

Salem Solomon, Correcting our corrections

Sue Cross
Return of the water cooler

Lauren Katz
Community becomes a core newsroom value

Steve Henn
Smart speakers get smarter

Stefanie Murray
Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

“Having basic data skills should be exactly as exciting as being able to send an email or make a phone call. Only then will data journalists lose their unicorn status, allowing the field of data journalism to simply disappear in the field of journalism.”

Winny de Jong, Data journalism goes undercover

“Social and audience teams share similar goals, but in 2019, I see the two merging in order to accomplish them. And quite frankly, I think it’s long overdue: Social will not just be about running accounts, but reaching audiences.”

Mandy Velez, Putting the social back in social media

Rishad Patel
A design system for responsible publishing

Jonathan Gill
Publishers build a common tech platform together

All predictions in chronological order

Celeste LeCompte

Local news needs local conversation to survive

“Most people don’t consume news because they want to be more informed about the news; they want to be informed about the news that they’re likely to talk about.”

Candis Callison

Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

“Indigenous journalists and media counter this systematic bias often by reporting on what isn’t covered (or covered well, or covered consistently) by other media. But also — and this is a crucial difference — they do so by turning to Indigenous people as experts on their lives and their histories.”

Mariana Moura Santos

From pageviews to impact

“Metrics of impact will be our golden data points; we need to understand if what we’re creating has any effect on the world we live in.”

Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

“Readers facing big issues will crave actionable perspectives.”

The rise of vertical storytelling

“In 2019, horizontal scrollytelling will feel stale and old. Vertical Storys will be all the rage.”

Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

“Some public-minded publications are beginning to sound like an NPR station during pledge week: An increasing amount of the work they produce seems to be about how important and vital it is that they continue to produce work.”

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue

“Much of the news currently published online is simply not worth paying for. Some of it is hardly worth our fleeting attention, let alone hard-earned cash.”

Unlocking the commons

“The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free.”

Correcting our corrections

“Reporters will use emerging technologies, new workflows, and input from their audiences to catch mistakes before they hit the web.”

Return of the water cooler

“When it comes to news, we want to know what everyone else knows, to make sure we’re seeing what we think we should.”

Community becomes a core newsroom value

“Newsrooms will no longer build community just because it’s nice; newsrooms will lean into the opportunity to connect with the people who are reading and sharing their work in order to have a devoted audience.”

Smart speakers get smarter

“There might be a dozen great new shows hidden inside your Google Home or lurking in Alexa’s brain — but if you don’t know how to ask a smart speaker for them, by name, you may never find them.”

Stefanie Murray

Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

“Nonprofits, public media, and digital natives are all well versed in collaboration. But newspapers, which still employ a huge chunk of local journalists across the United States, aren’t.”

Data journalism goes undercover

“Having basic data skills should be exactly as exciting as being able to send an email or make a phone call. Only then will data journalists lose their unicorn status, allowing the field of data journalism to simply disappear in the field of journalism.”

Putting the social back in social media

“Social and audience teams share similar goals, but in 2019, I see the two merging in order to accomplish them. And quite frankly, I think it’s long overdue: Social will not just be about running accounts, but reaching audiences.”

A design system for responsible publishing

“We’ve spent so many years designing for an emotional response. The time to design for responsibility is here.”

Publishers build a common tech platform together

“From a business standpoint, publishers aren’t competing with each other so much as they are with the big technology platforms — Google, Facebook, Apple, and so on. Yet publishers expend huge amounts of energy optimizing competitively against one another.”

Jennifer Dargan

You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions

“The best news organizations, those working to secure their place in a rapidly shifting journalism world, will not only recruit more people of color but will work hard to get them to stay by intentionally shifting the culture.”

AI finally becomes helpful

“More achievable projects — like feeding reporters story tips, automated tracking of data to uncover fraud, and scripts to keep published stories up-to-date — can make work easier for journalists.”

Francesco Marconi

The year of iterative journalism

“Iterative journalism is empathetic journalism: It uses audience interviews, surveys, analysis of comments, and observation to learn what readers care about, not just how many of them there are.”

In Europe, foundations invest in news

“A tiny fraction of European foundation funding goes to core support for journalism, especially in comparison to the U.S. Yet all of those foundations rely on the enabling environment a robust media provides in order to deliver their programs.”

The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing

“Four years ago, if you were a BuzzFeed or a Vox, you’d just eye NBC as your exit path. Now that story isn’t as attractive.”

Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist

“If the watch can become people’s primary device, it may provide the opportunity to switch the media paradigm from an endless stream to a concentrated dispatch.”

Fake news wins in Asia

“These democracies will be done in by their own mainstream political parties — including supposedly centrist, secular, democratic ones — who have no real answers for the genuine grievances of citizens.”

Carrie Brown-Smith

Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime

“If we want people to trust us, we need to recognize that objectivity is complex and that instead of prostrating ourselves blindly at its altar, we need to instead look harder at all of the subtle biases we have, how they affect our work, and how we can be more transparent about them.”

Seeing social media for what it is

“What’s the return on investment here? For each hour spent using social media for work, what, precisely, is gained? And what is lost?”

The coming splintering of conservative media

“Without Trump as its lodestar, the conservative mediasphere is likely to experience a period of fragmentation as well — competition for right-wing audiences and clicks will foster ideological sorting as different sites will seek to establish their niches and advance these competing conservatisms.”

Zuzanna Ziomecka

News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

“The next outdated hindrance to our sustainable future to be thrown into the volcano is old-school, big-man, charismatic, ego-driven leadership.”

Kjerstin Thorson

Time to get mad about information inequality (again)

“Information inequality is not new and it was not invented by Facebook, but the choices made by technologists and social media content producers alike tend to amplify unequal access to news.”

Raney Aronson-Rath

We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”

“Our shorter-form stories have done well digitally — but the big surprise to us over the past year has been just how strongly our longer-form journalism has resonated with digital audiences.”

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau

A more sincere definition of “community”

“Far too many media companies are pivoting to ‘community’ — creating chatty email newsletters, opening Slack channels or ‘members-only’ webinars, and offering free t-shirts or tote bags. These are more branding than community; the value proposition is weak.”

The platform tide is turning

“Instead of becoming more like technology companies or remaining beholden to platforms, publishers could help to build the internet they need.”

Give the audience a seat at the table

“A transparent and more inclusive process, especially when combined with a more equitable distribution of power, is one of the best ways to build relationships that are based on mutual respect and, most importantly, trust.”

A year of uncertainty and confidence

“We’ll all grasp that a 15 percent chance of something happening isn’t 0 percent, as any seasoned Dungeons & Dragons fan can tell you. It’s roughly the equivalent of rolling a 1 — or any other single number — on a six-sided die.”

Elizabeth Dunbar

Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

“I’ve written a lot of stories in my career that were probably of little value to the communities I cover. Most local journalists could say the same.”

Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change

“Local TV meteorologists have the weather expertise, the trust of their local communities, and the visual explanatory skills and graphics tools to tell this story in a way that will have impact.”

Matthew Pressman

The battle over objectivity intensifies

“Many of the nation’s most influential news outlets continue to apply standards of objectivity that were designed for more normal times. They turn presidential statements, even if patently false, into credulous headlines.”

Linda Solomon Wood

The year of the climate reporter

“The journalists who take up the work of climate change reporting in 2019 will include newly trained reporters as well as many industry veterans who are tired of burying references to climate change somewhere in the footnotes of the latest weather or disaster report.”

Reporters go on the offensive

“‘Engagement specialist’ will really just be ‘reporter,’ and those journalists declining to engage in these new ways will find their networks limited to other reporters like them.”

Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

“When we treat the sideshow as the main show, we actually disempower our readers. The world feels out of their hands; they think there’s nothing they can do to change it. Work that is good for democracy has to leave our audiences understanding what they can do.”

Angèle Christin

Algorithms and the reflexive turn

“In 2019, I hope that newsrooms will take this anti-algorithm stance to the next level by turning a critical eye to their own behavior.”

A shift to depth in video

“By treating video less as a marketing tool and more as a public service, they will no longer be surrendering the digital space to subpar journalism.”

We detox from Chartbeat

“With every media company feeling the pressure to iterate, diversify, and experiment with the next business model, now is not the time to be distracted.”

Meredith Artley

Huge demand for…anything but politics

“We’ve been moving away from the publishing of static web pages for some time. We’ll now move away from putting our distribution in the hands of others.”

Make foreign coverage less foreign

“There will always be a difference in how a story is framed, edited, and told by a journalist who gets to leave at the end of the day and one who is at home in the circumstances and community of the story.”

Johannes Klingebiel

We all grow hooves

“There’s a lesson to be learned here and it’s not about automation, but augmentation. Teaming up with AI, to become better, stronger, faster. To become a centaur.”

The homepage makes a comeback

“Publishers can’t control what Facebook or Twitter or Google or Apple will do in 2019. But they can control the homepage.”

Meeting people where they are

“You can’t make someone who doesn’t want to watch videos watch videos, or someone who doesn’t want to read longform read longform, and this is the year we’ll finally be okay with that.”

Haikus of the news

“We will discover / — despite our product roadmaps — / that one size fits none.”

Text hits a tipping point

“Text is affordable to produce, but it’s also affordable for others to repost and adapt.”

We will create our own spaces

“We will still write and delete draft tweets, still ask ourselves: Should I bite my tongue to keep my job, or say something to keep my sanity?”

Cristi Hegranes

A year to invest in the security of local journalists

“If the world is demanding these stories, then reporters must begin asking for risk mitigation strategies, training, legal options, and monetary resources.”

The death of consensus, not the death of truth

“We need a vision for a new journalism, and a clear path to supporting and sustaining it in a world where consensus can no longer be taken for granted.”

From trying to cover it all to covering what matters

“His reporters are usually maxed out with news from yesterday and today. But those daily stories rarely are the ones readers bring up when they stop him at the park.”

Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

“The model of a one-size-fits-all paywall can work at a national level, but for local sites, a more crafty approach will have to take hold.”

The year of the DIY podcast network

“The notion that a network is going to spot raw talent and scoop it up, making you wealthy (or at least wealthy by podcast standards) and famous (or at least famous by podcast standards) is a myth.”

A bright — and young — year for audio

“Already mobile-tethered and expecting content on demand, young people are a prime audience for this evolution of audio-based news.”

Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley

When a tech company pulls the plug on your story

“Every time a free tool goes freemium or a platform closes because it can’t make money, we’ve got an issue. What’s going to happen to the stories that tool feeds?”

The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders

“It’s not that those in charge now don’t know there are problems. It’s that they too often respond with versions of ‘Yes, but we can’t fix it,’ ‘Yes, but it takes time to fix it’ — or worse, a denial that it’s their problem to fix in the first place.”

Seeing our blind spots

“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.”

Pivot to people

“What was produced will take a back seat to the all-important question of who was informed and how it served them.”

The misfits become the bosses

“Our strength is that we see things in a different way, and the challenge is to not lose that perspective as we gain power. We may wear nicer suits now, but at heart, we’re still misfits.”

We consider who’s behind the camera

“Representation in photojournalism is critical, because those who control our news imagery control our collective visual narrative.”

“I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”

“2019 will be academic data journalism’s Walden year. Those of us who care about this stuff are going to go off to a metaphorical cabin in the woods and think about what we’re doing. Deeply.”

A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

“In 2019, we’ll see great improvements in mobile 3D volumetric capture, a technology that enables the digitization of three-dimensional space.”

Shannon McGregor

More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

“When journalists cover tweets from the president — as they often do — they almost always fact-check the claims Trump makes in his tweets. The same must go for social media posts from the public.”

Developing loyalty means developing your talent

“A great writer’s name carries weight, and their most loyal readers will follow them anywhere. In 2019, publishers will stop chasing virality and instead double down on developing loyalty, using their own talent.”

Shalabh Upadhyay

A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

“I believe the future will judge ‘post-truth’ phenomena as the logical next step in the technologically fuelled evolution of our collective social consciousness.”

A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

“Ocasio-Cortez’s uses of Instagram seem to be less about humanizing an individual politician than about politicizing humans; that is, bringing more humans, particularly young humans, into the fold and representing electoral politics as something they have a genuine stake in.”

Juleyka Lantigua

Podcasting battles East Coast bias

“Podcasting as an industry has to be bigger than New York. And we have to be intentional about making it so.”

Callie Schweitzer

The rise of the conveners

“As the internet becomes more saturated and noisy, consumers are searching for real, authentic human conversation that is more engaging than today’s passive media model.”

Committing to the truth, calling out lies

“Why have we used all types of Orwellian newspeak to describe what’s happening when a three-letter word defines it best?”

Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

“Consider these efforts now planned for 2019: Each has in common expertise, access to capital, aspirations for meaningful scale, and a dedication to high-quality local news and the communities it serves.”

Andrea Faye Hart

Doing less harm, not just more good

“Doing good entangles us with moral righteousness, the problematic ‘giving voice to the voiceless.’ Doing less harm instead means understanding how we have conditioned ourselves out of listening to those voices.”

You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis

“In the words of your kind of people, the planet will have a very, very bad user experience.”

The rise of international nonprofit news

“As populist governments gain more power, multilateralism faces threats, and the message of isolationism gets stronger, journalists have an even greater role to play in explaining important international issues and encouraging conversation and debate.”

Gideon Lichfield

Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

“The attention economy that has been driving the media industry for much of the past decade may be about to give way to a more old-fashioned economy, in which the scarcest resource is once again people’s money, not their time.”

Peter Cunliffe-Jones

The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

“In complex tinderbox societies, the potential for mis- and disinformation to sow not just social discord but real violence is very clear.”

Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Readers are only getting started

“To really be a reader-driven organization, every journalist that works there should be open to the knowledge, ideas, and concerns of their readers. You can’t outsource that interaction to an engagement editor.”

Personal branding is more powerful than ever

“The exponential rise of influencer culture has shown how powerful having your own audience online can be.”

From bridge roles to product thinkers

“A person doesn’t need to have a product title to be a product thinker. Newsrooms already have these strategists in their midsts — engagement editors, growth editors, digital editors — leading change.”

Rachel Davis Mersey

Local news goes minimalist

“The evidence that audiences are unwilling to pay for local news is actually clouded by the fact that most local news is not local at all.”

Catalina Albeanu

Being responsible for what we don’t know

“In small media organizations, ‘doing more with less’ has always been a reality — but the implications are catching up.”

Andrew Ramsammy

The great re-pivot to audio

“The middlemen who profit — agencies, buyers, and the like. They’ve been waiting for a moment like this.”

Pablo Boczkowski

Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

“To put it bluntly, the media do not mediate as they used to.”

Francesco Zaffarano

Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

“The people who own, manage, and shape them might go — but social media are not going away anytime soon.”

Robert Hernandez

Racists and sexists get replaced

“Instead of letting you burn us out and following the many that left this industry, this wave has decided to drown you out.”

Thomas Hanitzsch

The rise of tribal journalism

“In many parts of the world, tribal journalism compensates for a seeming fragmentation of society by nurturing a sense of belonging and exercising tribal solidarity.”

More newsrooms experiment their way to success

“As more news organizations do more with less, they must identify ways to fail smarter and prevent past failures from stifling the exploration of new ideas.”

More access, but not that kind

“It’s about shifting from thinking about conversation mainly as a reaction or afterthought to making it more central to how we conceive of and tell stories.”

A reckoning for tech’s work with news

“Major global efforts by tech companies to collaborate with the news industry will have matured to a point at which their effectiveness should be broadly judged.”

What do we owe the next generation?

“We’re at risk of permanently losing a generation of journalists to other fields due to instability — but also because of poor management, lack of support, and opportunities for growth.”

The story doesn’t end for the people we quote

“In 2019, I hope to see us talk more about the implications of approaching journalism as the work of telling stories — specifically, what it means for the people in those stories.”

Stephanie Edgerly

It’s time to understand the un-audience

“In addition to asking ‘why do people consume news?’ we need to ask (without judgment) ‘why don’t people consume news?'”

A return to destination journalism

“How a reader chooses to spend her time on her phone is our only true competitor.”

Moreno Cruz Osório

Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

“Electoral campaigns, especially that of the president-elected Jair Bolsonaro, accelerated a disintermediation process characteristic of the social internet.”

Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

“He’s like an indestructible monster in a Godzilla movie. The authorities keep firing at him, but he just keeps walking through town, gaining power.”

Ariel Zirulnick

Participation gets professional

“There’s an endless list of ‘jobs to be done’ in a news organization that audience members can be trained to do — or might already do better than journalists.”

Journalism as a technology service

“Over the years, journalists have innovated narrowly, focusing on how stories look rather than what journalism can do.”

Zizi Papacharissi

Old interface, say hello to the new interface

“Can we really build bots to detect bullshit when our own bullshit detectors are subpar?”

Knight Foundation

A year of local collaboration

“Gone are the days when a single news organization had the resources to dominate local news coverage, or when multiple news organizations would enter fierce competition to ‘win’ on the same local story.”

There is no magic — you’ve got this

“It was and always will be about serving your readers and now viewers, listeners, users and continuing to do so by adapting journalism fundamentals to ever-evolving contexts and challenges.”

Say it with me: Racism

“We are not in the hint business; we are here to report facts, including the difficult facts of racism.”

Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers

“We need to learn from the mistakes *we made* and collectively build better guardrails for the industry, ensuring that we don’t make these mistakes with large platform partners again.”

We are responsible for how we use our power

“We must collaborate on rewriting the power dynamics between newsrooms and each other, our audiences and those we seek to hold accountable.”

Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail

“In addition to seeing from 30,000 feet, we also need to be able to zoom in and know a journalism landscape as it exists from the vantage of those who live there.”

Heather Chaplin

Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system

“Our prism of partisanship as the fundamental way to view the world is dangerously myopic, blinding us to the real workings of power, and causing us not to ask the right questions.”

Rubina Madan Fillion

Fighting the reality of deepfakes

“This technology is evolving so rapidly that as quickly as we can find ways to counter it, its creators can adapt it to make it more convincing.”

Hossein Derakhshan

The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not

“It is losing its cultural relevance after almost two centuries — and thereby its commodity value.”

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff

From news fatigue to news avoidance

“Our biggest concern is that this will play out unevenly, perpetuating, or even increasing, existing inequalities.”

Power to the user

“The results of the 2018 midterms showed people that their votes count and that they can insulate themselves from disinformation campaigns by going to trusted sites instead of Facebook feeds.”

Just showing our work isn’t enough

“There’s very little current demand for the majority of reproducible code from newsroom leadership or the general audience.”

Darryl Holliday

Let’s talk about power (yours)

“If we don’t use it in ways that give people quality news, useful information and power, people will find a way around us.”

Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

“I believe 2019 is the year that a majority of young disenfranchised Africans and digital influencers will use the power of hashtag movements to demand greater responsibility from their leaders.”

Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

“The Canadian example will become a negative one, cited regularly by those arguing that governments should stay out of the news business and let the chips fall where they may.”

Kawandeep Virdee

Media wants to take care of you

“To inform readers means to also support readers’ care for themselves.”

Jenée Desmond-Harris

It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white

“Who exactly do we mean when we say ‘we’?”

Journalism becomes the escape

“Wouldn’t it be great if news organizations felt like something known, loved and trusted? If our neighbors retreated into work created by our organizations like they do into private texting groups or Netflix binges or that cozy corner booth at a favorite restaurant?”

We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)

“If an established, legacy newsroom hired 15, 23 year olds to run a vertical of their own, I’d read that. And maybe 23 year olds would, too.”

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky

The year of the lawsuit

“Perhaps even more consequential is the rise of cases that could fundamentally change settled libel law.”

Efrat Nechushtai

Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher

“Media is moving back from a 20th-century mass market to a collection of artisans who keep close ties with specific patrons, based on shared social, cultural and normative understandings.”

Voting rights becomes the new climate change

“Voter suppression doesn’t have to overturn an election to have an impact.”

Jean Friedman Rudovsky

Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

“How we treat each other as journalists and the relationships we form when working together are central to the success of the reporting, and in forging new paths for our industry.”

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer

The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”

“Hunting for a valid, data-tested reason to drop a promising idea reserves their team’s time for work that makes money and keeps great journalism alive.”

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie

The year product leads media

“We will start to see more senior leadership in news organizations that comes from design, product, and technology backgrounds.”

The year of the fight back

“2019 will be a turning point for journalism that does not shrink from spotlighting and critiquing threats to media freedom and the safety of journalists.”

The rise of content “pilots”

“In today’s mobile-driven environment, we need to concentrate on stories and follow them during the course of a news cycle.”

Catching up with “Neuland”

“While a concerted effort from politics, science, and journalism, as well as the civil society, is needed to find solutions to these thorny and contested issues, journalism in particular stands out as being the central chess piece.”

Bet on sports gambling

“Too many editors remember the era of seamy 900 numbers and sketchy appeals like ‘Lucky’s Rock-Solid-Dead-Bolt Lock of the Week.'”

Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

“Podcasting’s ‘bugs’ — difficult to scan, share, comment on — are actually its features.”

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros

Entering a more balanced era

“Subscriptions are not salvation. But a diversified digital revenue mix for publishers, with quality advertising and reader monetization at its core, might be.”

Data journalism becomes a global field

“As director of the Data Journalism Awards I saw a record number of entries in 2018 — nearly 700 — from 57 countries, and half from small newsrooms.”

M. Scott Havens

Time to swing for the fences

“We’ll see — and support and applaud — more media companies investing in innovation-based growth and taking far bigger risks on a new path towards financial success.”

For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption

“What do these companies want? Leadership, strategy, problem-solving, excellent communication skills, all buoyed by an undercurrent of tech savvy — just what journalism graduates should be able to deliver.”

Alexandra Svokos

Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

“Yes, yes, yes, journalism is about integrity and spreading information, but it’s also workers creating products, and consumers have been lucky to get this far into the internet age without having to pay much.”

Local news fails — in a good way

“If local newsrooms are going to achieve digital sustainability, we must try new things. That means getting out of our own way and taking risks, while knowing some attempts will fail.”

Reyhan Harmanci

Selling more stories to Hollywood

“The bidding wars over story options, typically a nice bonus check of a few hundred dollars, have created six and seven figure deals for writers and podcast producers.”

Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win

“As users look to rebuild their news habits, they’ll be looking for products that seamlessly integrate into their lives.”

The year of actionable (local) journalism

“There’s a lot of information out there. So what can the average information consumer do with it all?”

Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

“How can we reach an audience if that audience doesn’t see themselves, their hometowns, their families, even the brand of jeans they wear, portrayed in the media?”

Elisabeth Goodridge

Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over

“These are hard-won subscribers. Ensuring that they remain so loyal, so engaged and so connected to the journalism and mission that they stick around can’t be done by sales and marketing alone.”

The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

“We’ll also see news organizations and social media platforms clarify that deception and disinformation, like fraud, are unethical, and that these things violate their terms of service.”

We can acknowledge what we don’t know

“When it comes to the big questions in local news maybe the safer bet is to admit that no matter how venerable our institutions or talented our people, none of us has the answers”

Content competition from the tech companies

“Facing the expiration of streaming rights with networks that, too, resented the disruption that the platform created, Netflix did the only thing they could: they doubled down on originals.”

The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

“You can’t expect people to subscribe to their local paper (which is vital to democracy, we tell them) AND The New York Times and the Washington Post (because Democracy Dies in the Dark) AND…”

Tshepo Tshabalala

Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers

“In Africa, about 13 countries, including Senegal, Botswana, Namibia, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa and Guinea, will hold general elections at some point in the coming year.”

The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

“There will be tension between the need to satisfy the subscriber with the information she expects while still challenging her with the opposing views that she needs to make sense of the world.”

More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh

“When reporters find a suspect algorithm, they should also try to cover what could be done better.”

Nathalie Malinarich

Video — yes, video

“A generation of producers, VJs and reporters who grew up watching and making videos online is now leading the charge in many places.”

Rachel Glickhouse

Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

“Shouldn’t sources and communities be able to read stories that are written about them?”

The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom

“In the end, the platform fracturing will continue.”

Toward a symphony model for local news

“You can see the glimmers of a sustainable model for nonprofit local news — a combination of ongoing revenue (ads and circulation, along with events or membership fees), combined with ongoing philanthropic support and, over time, an endowment to fill in the gaps.”

We will finally confront systemic market failure

“Those unconstrained by market ideology might dare to consider what a new, truly public, digital media system could look like in the United States and beyond.”

Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

“In 2019, the media’s insistence on biting the hand that feeds it will drive it to examine the new biases and shortcomings of the new gatekeepers of attention.”

Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

“Local news organizations should become a driving force for better online public discourse, because Facebook and Twitter aren’t cutting it.”

The year you actually start to like your CMS

“If we do it right, users benefit from a feedback loop that helps make our work more valuable and relevant to them. And no journalist ever again has to wear their clunky CMS as a badge of honor.”

Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

“That will make journalists as important as ever, though it may not mean there are as many journalism jobs to go around.”

Amy Schmitz Weiss

Local news isn’t where you thought it was

“Local news is fluid and not fixed.”

Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron

Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing

“And when we start treating people not as consumers but as constituents, we’ll find new ideas, new allies and new resources to reverse the downward spiral in local journalism and restore the public’s trust in the news.”

We expand what (and how and who) we serve

“Next year will bring more problems, and with those problems a desire by news consumers for more solutions.”

Rebecca Searles

From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

“We will stop asking ourselves, ‘Are we a media company or a tech company?’ and find that the distinction is arbitrary. A truly collaborative company will be a new species altogether.”

Venture capital runs out of patience

“Revenue flows almost solely to the platforms and ‘time-honored’ media brands.”

Podcasts keep getting better

“It turns out that people — well, lots of people, anyway — are hungry for substance. Our attention spans are quite intact, ready, and willing.”

Carolina Guerrero

Spanish-language audio blows up

“In some ways, digital audio was made for the Spanish-language audience.”

Rebecca Lee Sanchez

We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater

“What we’re building is a journalism for journalists and we will ultimately feed ourselves to the gullet, becoming the harbingers of our own end.”

After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession

“The journalism ecosystem has been devastated by capitalism, but not destroyed. And the next ecosystem has already begun to emerge.”

Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

“We will see equally resourced, meticulously researched and well-produced podcasts from minority storytellers who will offer deep reportage about their own communities.”

A year to embrace journalism as public service

“In 2019 we will continue to bring together newsrooms, facilitators, and funders to forge a framework for revitalizing local news with public service at the center.”

The year of loyalty

“Gone are the days of aggregation by small and medium-sized brands. Gone are the days of chasing traffic. Gone are the days of one-size-fits all splashy marketing campaigns.”

Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

“In reality, many forms of both radicalization and infiltration would be more difficult with a media literate audience — particularly if those with the most influence had better skills and habits around assessing reputation and intent.”

The year of the culturally relevant curator

“May the playing field truly flatten.”

Elizabeth Jensen

Going where the Acela can’t take you

“More voices from the middle need to be amplified, because we already know what the extremes are.”

We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism

“For all the urgency around saving local journalism, it’s unclear to me that a persuasive, resounding case has yet been made to key stakeholders, much less the general public, about why it’s worth saving.”

Our future could lie within our own organizations

“As more and more publishers shift toward subscription and membership, the word “revenue” is making its way — and will increasingly be welcomed — into morning news conferences and planning meetings.”

Engaging people across lines of difference

“I see journalists actively engaging societal divides as a trend poised to take off, whether it’s rural/urban differences, political divisiveness, or any of the multitude of other cleavages facing society.”

Representation becomes more than a talking point

“A breadth of ideas ensures that we are going after untapped angles and asking the right questions, which may not always be the most obvious.”

Measuring impact will increase audience trust

“Showing impact will become an essential way to retain and expand the audience for reliable, accurate information. I believe our future depends on it.”

Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local

“The toolkit of social intelligence and listening devices is increasingly accessible for DIY video makers, lean local news departments, and international organizations in countries where press freedoms don’t exist.”

Alexandra Borchardt

Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience

“Unless candidates are fully dedicated to the cause of serving democracy, taking the financial and other risks in pursuing a journalism career is not that attractive any longer.”

News — but make it cinematic

“If Facebook made everyone a broadcaster and Instagram democratized photography, then Instagram Stories and Snapchat are making everyone visual designers.”

This is journalism’s do-or-die moment

“Putting Chartbeat and Google Analytics scripts on your site won’t get the job done anymore. In-house data scientists instrumenting the best conversion paths from user to subscriber will become as vital to the success of a newsroom as a metro reporter’s daily file from City Hall.”

AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

“Detecting AI-generated forgeries is not simply a new version of an old reporting challenge. No amount of journalistic ingenuity and doggedness will match the scale, speed, and accuracy at which they will be distributed in the coming years.”

The gap between journalism and research is too wide

“Journalists had piles of Chartbeat data, but few models for understanding the social psychology of media audiences. They were stuck musing about things like filter bubbles, bots, and young people paying for news, when there is growing research evidence available with answers to these questions.”

Seriously: What do you do for people?

“We talk constantly about pageviews and engagement rates, circulation stats and Nielsen ratings, subscriptions and donation rates, but all that happens when we successfully offer something to human beings that is of value to them.”

You can’t raise prices forever

“The last five years of raising subscription prices will begin to slow down as newspaper executives begin to notice even their most loyal subscribers have a price they will not pay.”

Charo Henríquez

Pivot to journalism

“We need to build and sustain trust in our audiences. And yes, ‘audiences’ not ‘audience,’ because digital news consumers are not monolithic, and neither should be the ways we look at them.”

Manoush Zomorodi

Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness

“While there are a handful of very good digital reading tools (Pocket, Flipboard, Kindle), the next wave of products will be built to deliver a better news consumption experiences.”

Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces

“Maybe I’m being too technologically determinist. Maybe this type of content won’t have a disproportionate impact. But the problem is I don’t think we have the ten years we need in order to wait for the longitudinal studies to be carried out.”

J. Siguru Wahutu

Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019

“I think the end of 2018 is the top of the rollercoaster track. The descent, which we are not ready for, is going to involve a lot of screaming as we hurtle towards Brexit in 2019 and the 2020 U.S. elections.”

Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”

“What can we learn from artists about conveying emotional truths that drive human decision-making? In a world of growing tribalism and skepticism about reported facts, helping people understand the world increasingly means helping people understand others’ feelings as well as their reasoning.”

The nationalization of political news will accelerate

“In this election cycle, the old saying that ‘the real presidential campaign begins after Labor Day’ might refer to 2019, not 2020.”

Emma Carew Grovum

The year of the loyal reader

“For years, we’ve seen news websites chasing bigger and bigger traffic gains. But the truth is driveby traffic is basically worthless.”

Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

“There may be only one thing about which Donald Trump’s administration and the Democrats who just took control of the House can agree: Tech platforms have enormous power that has to be tamed.”

Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

“In many ways, these are basic things — standards of journalism that have been around for centuries — but in today’s media environment, they are beginning to matter to readers and publishers more than ever.”

The year we step back from the platform

“Let’s replace the shadows that Twitter and Facebook and Google have been on the media with some business-model fundamentals. As 2018 has shown, they’ve offered us a lot more heartache than it feels like they’re actually worth.”

Simplify and redistribute

“I’m trying to be honest about what really matters about what we do as journalists and stop caring about the rest.”

The pendulum starts to swing back

“Donald Trump’s media diet, which is frozen in the 1980s, has pulled perceptions of the whole media industry — publishers, advertisers, politicians — into a kind of time warp.”

Whitney Phillips

Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended

“The media landscape is overrun with toxic narratives and polluted information not because our systems are broken, but because our systems are working.”

Building a digital hospice

“There is a semi-atemporality to web interfaces, which means that even a publication that hasn’t been updated in years might look like it’s still active. That irresolute state communicates to future readers that no one cared to treat it well in its final days. Perhaps no cared about it ever.”

Three ways national media will further undermine trust

“It’s not that journalists shouldn’t engage in fact-checking, nor is it that journalists should avoid presenting facts as verifiable and trustworthy claims about the world — it’s that they shouldn’t be so obnoxious about it.”

Fight the urge to run away from social media

“The bad guys — the fake-news makers, bots, trolls, and scammers — will gladly take over the community organizer roles we leave vacant. They’re pretty good at this sort of thing.”

Nicholas Jackson

More transparency around newsroom decisions

“Readers are paying attention — that’s what you want, isn’t it? — and they now have the tools to push back and to challenge our decisions.”

A focus on problems, not platforms

“Most users have lost trust in the breaking news products out there, and breaking news alerts have become an annoyingly sneaky way for companies to hit short-term wins.”

A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

“For news products to compete with the platforms they must engage readers to the same extent, recognizing the bar of UX is set in the minds of the reader across everything they experience on the internet, not just other publications.”

Tushar Banerjee

Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising

“Ad impressions and CTR numbers will become things of the past sooner than you think.”