20200
P
1
20100
R  E
2
2070
D   I   C
3
2050
T   I   O   N
4
2040
S   F   O   R   J
5
2030
O  U  R  N  A  L
6
2020
I  S  M  2  0  2  0
7

Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation

“Similar to the shift we’ve seen in the farm-to-table movement around food sourcing and production, people want to know what goes into news production.”

People want to pull the curtain back. They want more than the story: They want to understand who’s telling it, how it came together, and how it’s being paid for.

In dozens of conversations with people across the U.S. and world, news consumers told us they want more insight into how the news is made. Why was a headline written a certain way? Why was one story featured on the homepage and not another? Who are all of the people involved in making those decisions? Similar to the shift we’ve seen in the farm-to-table movement around food sourcing and production, people want to know what goes into news production, whether that’s knowing that a news organization adhered to a standard of verifying specific information via multiple sources, that journalists poured over thousands of pages of documents for a particular story, or the people involved in the chain of command of decision-making.

That transparency, while at times seemingly mundane, helps people understand what the work of a modern news organization entails and contextualizes it. Most importantly, it also helps them get to know the people involved in making the content they consume, and that’s crucial when it comes to trust. People trust people more than institutions. They also now feel fairly fluent in the mechanics of marketing. Individuals have become much savvier consumers as a result of social media. We encountered person after person casually dropping marketing language into the conversations we have with them. They wonder if they’re in a certain news organization’s “target demographic.” They talk about push notifications as “clickbait.”

In a social media economy that thrives on individual personalities and opinions, people find it hard to make sense of an institution’s motivations or financial incentives. “Was that breaking news notification sent because I really needed to know that information in that moment, or because a news outlet gets paid when I click on a link?” This hint of skepticism has been expressed to us repeatedly in our in-field user research.

Highlighting individual voices within an organization makes it easier to build a relationship of trust, because people — what they stand for and their motivations — feel more easily knowable, especially due to social media. Social media has, for better or worse, given rise to an easily accessible vetting system. People can look to Twitter to see the history of a person’s shares, positions, and opinions. They can look to Instagram to see #ad to know when someone is selling something. Institutions don’t always feel as knowable or as transparent. It is far harder to make sense of an organization’s motivations or financial incentives than it is to unpack a person’s Twitter or Instagram history. People can see when someone is promoting something, sharing a funny meme, or retweeting a particular article. In looking through a person’s history, it feels easier to understand what an individual is asking of you (if anything) or how he or she wants you to engage. WIthout giving people a behind-the-scenes look into the process of how a story comes together, people largely assume that an institution’s motivations are purely financial.

In order to build trust, news organizations must let people in on the processes and people that bring stories to life.

Kourtney Bitterly is research lead for product and design discovery at The New York Times.

People want to pull the curtain back. They want more than the story: They want to understand who’s telling it, how it came together, and how it’s being paid for.

In dozens of conversations with people across the U.S. and world, news consumers told us they want more insight into how the news is made. Why was a headline written a certain way? Why was one story featured on the homepage and not another? Who are all of the people involved in making those decisions? Similar to the shift we’ve seen in the farm-to-table movement around food sourcing and production, people want to know what goes into news production, whether that’s knowing that a news organization adhered to a standard of verifying specific information via multiple sources, that journalists poured over thousands of pages of documents for a particular story, or the people involved in the chain of command of decision-making.

That transparency, while at times seemingly mundane, helps people understand what the work of a modern news organization entails and contextualizes it. Most importantly, it also helps them get to know the people involved in making the content they consume, and that’s crucial when it comes to trust. People trust people more than institutions. They also now feel fairly fluent in the mechanics of marketing. Individuals have become much savvier consumers as a result of social media. We encountered person after person casually dropping marketing language into the conversations we have with them. They wonder if they’re in a certain news organization’s “target demographic.” They talk about push notifications as “clickbait.”

In a social media economy that thrives on individual personalities and opinions, people find it hard to make sense of an institution’s motivations or financial incentives. “Was that breaking news notification sent because I really needed to know that information in that moment, or because a news outlet gets paid when I click on a link?” This hint of skepticism has been expressed to us repeatedly in our in-field user research.

Highlighting individual voices within an organization makes it easier to build a relationship of trust, because people — what they stand for and their motivations — feel more easily knowable, especially due to social media. Social media has, for better or worse, given rise to an easily accessible vetting system. People can look to Twitter to see the history of a person’s shares, positions, and opinions. They can look to Instagram to see #ad to know when someone is selling something. Institutions don’t always feel as knowable or as transparent. It is far harder to make sense of an organization’s motivations or financial incentives than it is to unpack a person’s Twitter or Instagram history. People can see when someone is promoting something, sharing a funny meme, or retweeting a particular article. In looking through a person’s history, it feels easier to understand what an individual is asking of you (if anything) or how he or she wants you to engage. WIthout giving people a behind-the-scenes look into the process of how a story comes together, people largely assume that an institution’s motivations are purely financial.

In order to build trust, news organizations must let people in on the processes and people that bring stories to life.

Kourtney Bitterly is research lead for product and design discovery at The New York Times.

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

Rachel Davis Mersey   The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide

Cory Haik   We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

Dannagal G. Young   Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart

Jim Brady   We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

M. Scott Havens   First-party data becomes media’s most important currency

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Zizi Papacharissi   A president leads, the press follows, reality fades

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

J. Siguru Wahutu   Western journalists, learn from your African peers

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

Christa Scharfenberg   It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women

Errin Haines   Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Millie Tran   Wicked

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Mario García   Think small (screen)

AX Mina   The Forum we wanted, the forum we got

Nicholas Jackson   What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support

Carrie Brown   Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening

A.J. Bauer   A fork in the road for conservative media

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz   News coverage gets geo-fragmented

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

Linda Solomon Wood   Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal

Nico Gendron   Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The business we want, not the business we had

Kourtney Bitterly   Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb   Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Bill Adair   A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song

Marie Gilot   This is fine

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

John Garrett   It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization

Raney Aronson-Rath   News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions

Joanne McNeil   A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

Kevin D. Grant   The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks

Lucas Graves   A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker   A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Power to the people (on your audience team)

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context

Nik Usher   All systems down

Joshua P. Darr   All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

Laura E. Davis   Know the context your journalism is operating within

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Irving Washington   Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job

Matt DeRienzo   Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

Margarita Noriega   The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving