Sic transit gloria scripturam.
In 2019, the written word will begin to taper as the primary vehicle of journalism. It’s been a long time coming: Video, graphics, podcasts, and interactives have all been bubbling, and in 2019 we may approach a tipping point.
This transition makes good business sense: Text is affordable to produce, but it’s also affordable for others to repost and adapt. More sophisticated formats are more distinctive. As publishers move towards subscription-supported models, richer content can be more unique, engaging, and memorable. Done well, it can also be evergreen, as it can be leveraged across story packages whenever relevant themes are in the news.
There are significant barriers to this evolution in formats. One of the largest may be the cultural gap between editorial and technology. Journalism schools and newsroom structures have been moving towards more hybrid programs and projects, but the transition is incomplete. Nonetheless, successful examples of non-traditional formats will snowball, building momentum around strong, impactful, cost-effective journalism that is more than written words and occasional photos.
You’ll know we’ve arrived when Nieman Lab’s predictions for the coming year are not primarily text. Look forward, instead, to short videos, animated GIFs, mini-podcasts, and cartoons. When you see it here, you’ll know we’re arriving.
Justin Kosslyn is head of product management at Google Jigsaw.
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
AX Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service