When publishers realized that the scale of social networks could be used to distribute news, we threw our journalism into them. We didn’t think about much more than the extra eyeballs we’d win. The platforms gave us all a real boost. Then came aggregators. Then clickbait. Then fake news. All at enormous scale. Now, the fightback.
In 2019, the media will work more actively on reversing the long-term trend of decline in trust in the media. And lawmakers will demand that social platforms use their enormous power to help.
Platforms already have teams of people working on this. Knowing that the first step to greater trust is transparency, Facebook’s news integrity program has so far shipped a way for publishers to provide extra information about their operations, such as their ethics policy and governance structure. This information is tentatively available to users. In 2019, Facebook will feel the pressure to reveal the results of these tests, and to scale up whatever benefits they bring. This could include detecting the quality of that information and weighting the associated content accordingly in feeds. Google and YouTube have begun similar work.
Many of these ideas come from the Trust Project, a consortium of publishers including The Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, and El Mundo. The project is founded on research that shows how a user’s trust relies on publisher transparency. The publishers who have committed to users’ expected level of transparency reach 217 million users a month. But that’s not enough. The consortium will continue to grow in 2019 and begin work on continually verifying that members stick to their promises.
The work of publishers and the platforms will have to converge in 2019. Working separately will not be enough to tackle the scale of the problem of distrust in our media. And in any case, lawmakers are watching. 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. In the case of news, this power is used to subvert democracy. Facebook has even admitted that it was used to incite genocide in Myanmar, including through the spread of fake news. The Democrats will use their own renewed influence in Congress to investigate this power and will almost certainly propose legislation to force the platforms to act.
Trust has been in decline for a long time. Two things raise the chance of a reversal to start in 2019: the collective effort of publishers, and the pressure that they and lawmakers will put on platforms.
Adam Smith is audience engagement editor at The Economist.
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
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
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
AX Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service