2
0
1
9

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.”

More information curation. Not long ago, I would not have believed anyone would pay a monthly subscription for an app that coached them on how to sit still every day. I don’t need an app for that, thank you very much.

And yet, the top 10 mindfulness and meditation apps, which make up most of the “self-care” app category, reportedly brought in $27 million in worldwide revenue in the first quarter of 2018 alone. I have six meditation apps on my phone right now. And I predict that what tech has done for mindfulness, it will attempt to do for our information overload and misinformation problems.

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. Some versions are already out there: the beta of the Kinzen app aims to”give every citizen a daily news experience that earns their trust”; I see ads for SmartNews wherever I go; and although Civil’s attempt at launching a crypto-economy for journalism failed, the startup plans to release a WordPress plugin that gives its vetted network of publications the option to archive their work on the Ethereum blockchain. I’ll save the debate over whether blockchain publishing is useful for another post, but some believe doing so can serve as a mark of quality, or indicator of a publication’s ethics and independence to the reader.

Impatience with paywalls. Meanwhile, as more and more newsrooms and apps charge subscription fees to make up for revenue lost to Facebook and Google, we’ll see password fatigue morph into paywall fatigue. Most of us are numb to the unending prompts to create new “safe” passwords, but the increasingly requests to “subscribe” every time we click to read an article will begin to wear on even the most dedicated and thoughtful news consumers. I would happily pay for a year’s bundled subscription to Wired, The Washington Post, and Medium, at a discounted rate with a single login. Similar to Tony Haile’s Scroll service (which bundles outlets into an ad-free experience), outlets will consider consolidating their offers for paid content in 2019. If not, Apple News will continue doing the best job of curating the news, while taking its cut of advertising dollars.

Cobbling it together. On the other end of the media spectrum, a number of homegrown publications will attempt to replicate the small-scale but impressive successes like those of the podcast collective Radiotopia and the crowdfunded newsroom De Correspondent. Both have proven that journalism doesn’t have to “scale” to survive, as long as the relationships they build with listeners and readers is long-term and heartfelt. I think we’ll see more of these independent journalism outlets lean on each other for resources, cross-promotion, and collaboration, just as ProPublica has done successfully and Julia Angwin says she’ll do with The Markup. Again, Civil’s blockchain promises remain unproven, but the group of journalists it recruited to found its “First Fleet” of newsrooms have thrived on relatively small grants.

Journalist as entrepreneur. Remember a decade ago when journalists were told they each needed to build a personal brand? This year, the message will also be that journalists need to become entrepreneurs. I recently launched my own mini-media company, so feel free to call me naive or overly optimistic.

But I’ve worked as a staffer, freelancer, on-contract, and now a founder; I’ve worked for government-funded media (the BBC), an international news service (Thomson Reuters), and listener-supported public radio (WNYC). Even in public radio, the message to producers is to create audio products that have multiple revenue streams: increase membership, spinoff products, sponsorship, live events, grants. They haven’t moved to the subscription model, yet but that’s likely coming very soon. As part of our new venture, Stable Genius Productions, my cofounder and I are cobbling those options together (hell, we even gave crypto a go) to support ourselves while owning our intellectual property and maintaining editorial control. We’re even documenting the process in our meta podcast ZigZag.

The Google/Facebook duopoly won’t convince most journalists to “move fast and break things,” but perhaps we need to get more comfortable with other trite startup terminology like “failing forward” and “pivoting.” As Joe Lubin, the founder of Consensys, told me, “We live in exponential times.” Experimentation may be the new business model.

Manoush Zomorodi is cofounder of Stable Genius Productions and cohost of ZigZag.

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

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

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

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

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

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

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

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

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

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

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

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

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

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

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

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

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Hearken   Pivot to people

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

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

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

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

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

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

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

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

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

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

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

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

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

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

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

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

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

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

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

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

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

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

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

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

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

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

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

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

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

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

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

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

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

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

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

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

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

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

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

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

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

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

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

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

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

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

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

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

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

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

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

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

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

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

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

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

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

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

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

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

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

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

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

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

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

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

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

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

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

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

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

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you