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Haikus of the news

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

We call them “users,”
but they’re individuals
doing their own thing.

Watch their behaviors.
Are they very similar?
Look how they differ!

Quinn reads newspapers,
Jamie skims aggregators,
Chris watches TV.

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

Design, build, and test.
Prototype new solutions.
Meet them where they are.

Text Dale a chatbot,
push Pat notifications,
feed Sam on social.

Throw out the playbook!
Find each and every use case,
and ship bespoke news.

Recognize the needs
of the new news consumer.
“Users” are humans.

Libby Bawcombe is the manager of design research and strategy at NPR.

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Stephanie Edgerly   It’s time to understand the un-audience

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

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

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Umbreen Bhatti   The story doesn’t end for the people we quote

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

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

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Steve Myers   From trying to cover it all to covering what matters

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Raney Aronson-Rath   We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Amy Schmitz Weiss   Local news isn’t where you thought it was

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

Millie Tran   There is no magic — you’ve got this

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

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

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

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

Tyler Fisher   This is journalism’s do-or-die moment

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Jenée Desmond-Harris   It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Cristi Hegranes   A year to invest in the security of local journalists

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Frank Mungeam   Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

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

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

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

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Manoush Zomorodi   Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness

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

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

Hearken   Pivot to people

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Amy King   We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Sarah Stonbely   Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail

Frank Chimero   Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist

Tshepo Tshabalala   Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers

Simon Galperin   After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley   When a tech company pulls the plug on your story

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

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

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Kevin D. Grant   A year to embrace journalism as public service

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

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

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Angilee Shah   The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Heather Chaplin   Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”

Kjerstin Thorson   Time to get mad about information inequality (again)

Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron   Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing

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

Carrie Brown-Smith   Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime

Tushar Banerjee   Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Matt Karolian   Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

AX Mina   The death of consensus, not the death of truth

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau   A more sincere definition of “community”

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Adam B. Ellick   Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local

Rebecca Lee Sanchez   We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Mike Isaac   The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Efrat Nechushtai   Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher

Cindy Royal   For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Alyssa Zeisler   We expand what (and how and who) we serve

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

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

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

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

J. Siguru Wahutu   Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019

Seth C. Lewis   The gap between journalism and research is too wide

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty