Highlights from Nieman’s Predictions for Journalism 2015
In one hours-long sitting over the holidays, I binge-read all 65 of the predictions from smart people from across the media world that Nieman published in its Predictions for Journalism 2015. As I read, I made highlights (using Instapaper’s awesome, worth-paying-for tool). Here are my highlights and some highlights from my highlights (in bold).
If you find something of interest, be sure to read the full piece at Nieman. These are simply my highlights—they’re not summaries and I didn’t highlight from every piece.
I’ve grouped these quotes in a few themes that emerged. Curation was a big one and it’s a topic near and dear to me, so let’s start there. The other groupings below are: audience development and monetization, news presentation, newsroom culture (mostly calls for diversity and hack/hacker relations), and a catch-all “other predictions.”
(Plug: two of my favorite curated emails are What We’re Reading from The New York Times, which I helped launch, and my own curated newsletter, Apropos of Nothing.)
Curation
The future of news will inevitably involve making hard decisions about serving people not just what we think they should know, but what they might like to know — even if they don’t know it.
One of the biggest insights I took away from the Times’ great mobile success, NYT Now, is that there is a big reward in engagement in giving people a smaller number of stories, served up at the right time of day and in the right format
The difference between seeking information and seeking knowledge is that the latter helps someone live her life and empowers her to make informed decisions — to not just know, but to understand.
Email newsletters as editorial products are specifically suited to this transformation of information into understanding. They have a built-in (and widely available) distribution system, are tied to an individual reader, and look great on mobile. B2B companies and marketing types long figured out the value of email and news organizations are smart to catch on. A newsletter can become a daily habit, just as the morning newspaper was for many, and create loyal readers.
If in 2009 we were urged to jump into the stream, and in 2013 to reconsider that leap, then this is the year that we finally fight the flow of the stream, take stock and start making smart filters. In 2015, several trends will converge to push these types of products ahead: refocusing on the reader, the migration of readers to mobile, publishers’ increasing desire for control in reaching their audience, and yes, continued rebellion against the stream.
There have been more than a few stories about the resurgence of email newsletters, explainers, and niche networks. What these products have in common is the ability to turn information into understanding.
The tools have arrived. It’s time for us to build.
Why are we so damn serious all the time? Is there space to report on the messy betweens or the small pockets of joy in darkness?
If we are serious about news being for all the people (word to Juan and Joe), we need to start rethinking how we deliver stories. And to do this, we have to stop thinking about how to leverage whatever hot social platform is making headlines and instead spend time understanding how communication is changing. What does news sound like in a remix-focused culture? How do we convey an entire story in brief, Instagrammable image? (Hint: Photojournalists have an answer to this, as well as artists and fashion houses.)
We’ve seen sparks of this in newsletters, which often have a “What I’m reading from around the web” section. See What We’re Reading from The New York Times.
What if our readers weren’t just tweeting links to individual stories, but creating full mixtapes of articles, annotating them with what they found interesting or what they disagreed with, and sending these crafted packages out to their friends? The opportunity for anyone to pull in a story opens opportunities for discoverability and sharing.
Mixtapes are a highly crafted personal statement. They are intimate, compiled from careful selection and ordering, often accompanied with liner notes and artwork. Mixtapes are a useful construct because they provide a layer of commentary on top of a package, which humanizes the content. It’s not just a cold link, but rather something with personal notes.
What I love about reading an actual newspaper is the delight of coming across stories I normally wouldn’t go out of my way to read. But since it’s right there, hanging out in the middle of the page just waiting to be seen, I’ll read it.
If the rise of podcasts and newsletters has taught us anything this year, it’s that there’s value in consuming bundled content
Instead of trying to capitalize so heavily on an individual story, this year we’ll move to bundling articles and ideas. We’ve already seen Vox introduce their cardstack primitive, experimenting with a new way of presenting contextual packages of information to explain the news. In 2015, we’ll approach stories less as atomic units themselves, but rather as subunits that can be packaged within a new type of content primitive: mixtapes.
Audience Development & Monetization
One of the most important lessons came from conversations with those responsible for building incredibly addictive games: Optimize a person’s first 45 taps.
Something is wrong with tap 28. Why are new users not detonating their candy? What happens if we replace wrapped candy with candy covered in neon Christmas lights? What if we move detonating candy to tap 23? This data helps inform a game publisher as to what isn’t working and what changes should be prioritized and tested.
The first 45 taps helps reinforce process over outcomes. As mobile eats the world, we need to figure out what our first 45 taps are for news. In 2015, I expect more of your colleagues to care about user paths and actions. I expect your bosses to ask what is a reader, listener, or viewer expected to do next? How do you know they should do this? What do we learn when they surprise us? How do we learn as our audience changes?
2015 will be the year that one of three things happen. Option 1 is that more outlets will mirror the news app Circa, allowing users more detailed control over the notifications that they receive on their phone lock screens, the new front page. Or outlets will figure out how to get smarter about how they target users with notifications for things that aren’t breaking, above-the-fold stories. Or they’ll cede that real estate to apps that can deliver specific, detailed information that we might once have called news.
Among the more frequent complaints I see on Twitter about large news organizations is when their notifications misfire. News organizations (including my employer, The Washington Post) send out notifications with news that they consider important. The recipients not infrequently disagree.
These personally relevant news experiences will also ease another business challenge: knowing who will pay. Publishers unable to compete against the mass scale of a Facebook or Google will now be able to sell their clients an audience of real people spending real time with trustworthy content.
Learning from Google, news organizations will make multivariant testing the norm. No longer will there be a singular front page — instead, each person will see a news mix refined ever so slightly to reflect their region, interests, and habits. While some will be tempted to game the system to drive clicks, the best newsrooms will develop a cohesive news narrative echoing the brand’s strength even as it reflects the reader’s unique interests.
We have become supplicants to other platforms in order to get our readers. That’s already a problem, and it’s going to be a bigger problem. How do we increase both the broadness of reach and the depth of loyalty with our own names as news organizations and not as a brand page at the indulgence of fickle Silicon Valley trend-chasing? Do we collaborate with other news organizations to create our own social platforms? Will the answer be partnerships and memberships that draw readers into news brands by combining reporting with live events and entertainment and context? (That’s the approach taken by my newspaper as well as others like The Atlantic, and I think it’s a good start.) Do we compete harder against rivals, or find some way to join forces?
In Internet terminology, they talk about the “deep web” of content that search engines never show. We face a similar “dark web” of readers we never see: Who are they? How do they consume news? How do we reach them if they’re interested in news but not interested in Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? There’s a vast segment of America that wants to consume news, but isn’t as savvy and app-happy as journalists. These are the readers that, years ago, would have had newspaper subscriptions. They don’t spend their day clicking all over the Internet: They’ll read news online (or maybe they won’t), but they fall back on a few established brands and don’t know about the variety of choices out there for news consumption.
There’s another kind of reader who doesn’t make a peep — who doesn’t friend us or follow us or read bylines. This reader may own a smartphone and use email, but doesn’t care much for apps. He hasn’t enabled alerts. She watches cable news but finds Facebook tiresome and Twitter exhausting, and only goes to Google when there’s an enormous news event like the Malaysian plane or the Boston bombings.
People will pay for gonzo.
I’m more interested in the idea of gonzo as a metaphor — for what it signifies in rethinking the meaning of journalism. To me, gonzo means doing the opposite to what stands for the norm in a given era. So if the norm suggests an obsession with instantaneity, scoops, being the first to report something, then gonzo would mean slow news, context, and being the last to tell a story — but possibly the one to tell the most interesting and thoughtful story.
Newer generations of readers are not accustomed to paying for the news
Newspapers are not done experimenting with paywalls. This is unfortunate, because valuable energy is wasted on figuring out how to charge for content rather than producing content readers will want to pay for.
This year saw The New York Times invest in Blendle, an “iTunes for news” that sells content on a per-article basis. Next year will see further experimentation around micropayments and around an iTunes for news, Spotify for news, or Netflix for news, offering readers the chance to buy news articles from a range of providers.
The game-changing aspect is that Uber users get the option to adding their payment details by taking a photo of their bank card. The closing scene of the party was of a group people photographing their cards, signing up and sharing credit via promo codes. Name me a paid-for news site that has a payment method so easy that a new subscriber could sign up in less than five minutes while in a dark room after having consumed a few glasses of festive punch.
For news organizations, the risks of the reemergence of the bundle may outweigh the benefits of reaching new audiences. The story is disconnected from the original source with the brand fading into the background. A news outlet ends up playing by someone else’s rules in terms of what makes it to the new front page. There is little certainty as who is prominent today will still be visible tomorrow. When social signals and algorithms shape the bundle, news choices end up being impermanent, transient, and ephemeral, with no guarantees that today’s audience for a particular news organization’s work will be there tomorrow.
Then there are the social signals that have been increasing in importance as social networks like Facebook (and perhaps Twitter in the future) tap into them to decide what people see. The collective actions of friends, contacts, and loose acquaintances produce individualized bundles of news, assembled by invisible algorithms. These algorithms, written by software engineers, are the new gatekeepers, drawing on the editorial decisions of our social circles.
device itself is becoming the gateway to the news and not just in terms of the apps that make it onto the first homescreen of the device. The lock screen, with its notifications, is the new gateway into what matters at any particular moment. The notifications from news apps that make it onto that lock screen are in prime position to capture attention. The lock screen is the new bundle.
News Presentation
But for all that, we are not quite “post-text.” For the billions of people whose Internet is very much like the one I grew up with — sporadic if available; delivered through underpowered devices with limited and slow data packages, if any — the text message is still king. What is the future if not unevenly distributed?
Newsrooms would do right to publish staffers’ more human and personal offerings, instead of sending their best work off to Medium or Facebook.
Bad community is worse than no community. Feedback and conversation around published work will increasingly happen in spaces you can’t see, or forums you don’t like or understand, and in ways you can’t directly influence or control. If you don’t care enough to take on the responsibility of creating and maintaining a safe space, just disable comments, add a “Share on WhatsApp” button to your article template, and focus on the things you can do well.
It may be just a slight shift in mental framing and vocabulary, but I think it could be a powerful one. We talk about politics in seasons, for example — primary season, campaign season, election season — but what if we actually brought the logic and approach of the programming season to the different phases of the next presidential election? What if some of our beats were reimagined as seasons, with a bit more structure and focus, and a bit less permanence? What would an investigative journalism project look like if it were organized and released as a season instead?
Newsroom Culture
Successful large newsrooms will no longer just operate in the outdated department structure that stems from the print age, but increasingly around projects and required skill sets. Coders, graphics workers, and multimedia specialists should be spread throughout large newsrooms and not be confined to centralized “service centers.” Newsrooms that accommodate this shift will attract and retain better talent, and will produce the best journalism.
News organizations that dilute or lose their unique identity will flounder. To legacy brands that seek to capitalize on short-term audience gains by mimicking newcomers, the coming year may bring a rude awakening when suddenly they’re left with a whole bunch of clicks — and a gaping hole in lieu of a meaningful brand.
The relation between news and business should, on many fronts, be one of shared goals, shared ambitions, and a shared roadmap. An ongoing structured dialogue can accomplish that. The relation should work less like a wall and more like a canal, purpose-built and with a clear narrow focus, transforming the areas it connects. Those news organizations that align with business colleagues on relevant issues will be better positioned to respond to competitive threats.
Figure out how to explain what your strategy is in plain English (or in any language other than business jargon). If you — and everyone in your newsroom — can’t do that, you don’t have a good strategy. Understanding how the organization plans to sustain itself and grow isn’t a violation of Church and State.
And yet. The economic problems, the data problems, the audience quantification problems remain unsolved. Indeed, they are the economic facts of life for any modern-day publisher, no matter how little their magazine or diverse their sources of artistic inspiration. The way that a culture of measurement, quantification, and virality can coexist with an intellectual culture that takes a more deliberate, longer-term view of political and intellectual life is a problem that is likely to outlast many of the publications I have mentioned here. But if the problem is ever to be tamed, it will in part be tamed by the journalists and publishers working for these little magazines: magazines that still somehow manage to care about slow ideas and silent thought in an era of speed.
Data is not the problem — it’s the way we talk about data. And this obsession with the quantitative is, of course, the exact problem that the increasingly threatened liberal arts were built to solve.
So here’s my single, most important tip for building a truly integrated newsroom: Talk to one another. And maybe become BFFs.
Beyond Facebook, we may even see muted autoplay become more common because of how powerful it is to get attention.
I’ve been thumping this drum for years and years now, and I think we may have reached the tipping point where complacency cedes to proactivity and stubborn blinders are forced off by even more stubborn awareness. The word “diversity” may bring eyerolls (and if that’s you, mofo, check yourself because you’re perilously behind) but it’s also bringing headaches, and power doesn’t like headaches. (Hello from a headache! Happy to be here.) Upshot: The more someone like Satya Nardella takes the heat for bad diversity numbers, the more incentivized he will be to say to his managers: Fix this. And guess what? “We tried!” is no longer an excuse. “We couldn’t find anyone qualified!” is no longer an excuse.
And lo! In November, I saw something that made my heart leap: Bloomberg went there. From Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler’s memo to staff: “All Bloomberg News enterprise work must include at least one woman’s voice, and preferably a balance of men and women. Women are engaged in every topic we cover. Our journalism should reflect that variety.”
But too many journalism organizations have neglected the abundance of data and retreated in one of two disappointing ways. They’ve either retrenched into the “we’re going to tell you what we want because we know better” mindset — or they’ve cut a substantial amount of their news coverage in trade for softer stories. Today, smaller players in the media marketplace such as Vice News, theSkimm, AJ+ (for which I have done audience consulting), Vox, and the Young Turks should be applauded, even if you don’t like them. Yes, they have definitive tones and the niching of media is much maligned. The truth is that media audiences have always self-selected. These brands are connecting with their audiences (in these cases millennials) and discussing news in approachable, engaging ways.
Our strategic mantra for 2015 is “Yes.” Just say yes.
We need (and will create) measures for that which is now unmeasurable — how many people who download a podcast actually listen to it? What emotional response compels a viewer to action after seeing/hearing/interacting with a documentary? Why and when are listeners crossing over from a mobile experience to a broadcast? Once we have more of a grasp, we’ll slip out of the chaos and back into a predictive cycle.
Other Predictions
It’s crazy that most newsrooms are still using plain, old HTTP instead of HTTPS for their websites. HTTP is insecure and easy to manipulate maliciously. As Google begins treating HTTPS-enabled sites with better PageRank, you better believe more news organizations are going to want a secure page.
For me, 2015 is the year technology empowers content — whether creation or consumption. It’s not the year of technology — it’s the year of the content made on the technology. Meaning tools for creating apps, VR, AR, etc. are moving from developers to content creators. Think of the moment when blogs empowered non-coders to create new content on the web.
I predict 2015 will be the year that someone invents a great asset management solution to manage print and digital content that will give us these much-needed efficiencies — enabling us to be more competitive.
In my future scenario, we would publish content to a central repository. No styles, just the text. Print editors publish the content that will appear in print to this system. Web editors publish to this system. It’s a new kind of CMS that isn’t driven by the output format. We need to divorce the content from the display and destination. Just create the content and store it centrally.
It’s pivotal because after years of publisher disintermediation and advertising commoditization, we’ve got a class of advertisers who value things like storytelling, engagement, and time spent with content. When it comes to native, publishers once again own the printing press. So my hope is that 2015 is the year when we will all start to see native advertising not as a threat to serious journalism, but as a critically important revenue stream that will help us fund it.
Quite simply, native advertising is advertising for people who read things. And I think that’s totally pivotal for journalism.
Do you know which companies and individuals have access to your internal chats and emails? Have you checked what metadata is stored within those confidential documents you’re posting online? Are you up to date on the security releases for the software you use at work? And what about your readers — how much privacy are they granted? Security isn’t convenient. When you’re racing against a deadline, end-to-end encryption can seem unnecessarily complicated. Right now, digital security has a steep learning curve and is not always user-friendly. But the stakes are high — really high.
Until that happens, in anticipation of it happening, legacy publishers should use the breathing space of the coming moment to increase their investments in transforming their products, quickening the pace of change at their publications, doubling down on truly distinctive content and services, developing or expanding new revenue streams (including events and perhaps services that can gain leverage from a particular traditional brand), becoming “digital first” in more than just rhetoric. Resisting the temptation to greater profit now could go some ways to mitigating loss later.
GDP has now been expanding for 23 consecutive quarters, while the length of the median postwar expansion is just 17 quarters. In other words, historically, we’re already about a year and a half overdue for a recession. Whenever that recession comes — and it now seems likely it won’t be too soon — advertising will take a sharp dive, and the reallocation of ads away from print (and broadcast TV) will accelerate. One lesson of the period since 2009 is that the advertising lost in the next recession won’t return to legacy publishers in the subsequent recovery.
Wow, you made it. Well done. (Sorry to end on those last two—probably accurate—downer predictions.) Let’s build great stuff in 2015!
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