A surprisingly good year

“The pandemic shined a light on the need for local journalism and local news outlets will benefit from new relationships residents are building with their local news providers.”

2021 will be a really good year for the business of local news.

Local news is one industry this pandemic did not disrupt. The pandemic shined a light on the need for local journalism and local news outlets will benefit from new relationships residents are building with their local news providers.

If news organizations take advantage of the opportunity, all newsrooms can benefit from all revenue streams. Reader revenue will continue to grow, “owned” digital dollars will grow — even print advertising revenue can grow as the news organizations use their unique place in the marketplace to demonstrate their enormous value to the communities they serve.

I believe large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, digital and legacy all stand to have a surprisingly good 2021.

John Garrett is the founder and CEO of Community Impact News.

2021 will be a really good year for the business of local news.

Local news is one industry this pandemic did not disrupt. The pandemic shined a light on the need for local journalism and local news outlets will benefit from new relationships residents are building with their local news providers.

If news organizations take advantage of the opportunity, all newsrooms can benefit from all revenue streams. Reader revenue will continue to grow, “owned” digital dollars will grow — even print advertising revenue can grow as the news organizations use their unique place in the marketplace to demonstrate their enormous value to the communities they serve.

I believe large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, digital and legacy all stand to have a surprisingly good 2021.

John Garrett is the founder and CEO of Community Impact News.

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Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

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Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok

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Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

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Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

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Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

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Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

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Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

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A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

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Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

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Cory Haik   Be essential

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

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Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

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Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

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