Nieman Lab End of Year predictions 2014

predictions_2014.json

[
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/content-creators-are-users-too\/",
    "story": "We\u2019ve seen a lot of innovation over the past few years in how content is presented: Circa leveraging mobile to deliver evolving topics, Vox card stacks bringing context to news, and sites continuing to raise the bar for visual storytelling. It\u2019s an exciting time, and there\u2019s plenty more to come as companies continue to bring journalism and technology together. But while consumers are reaping the benefits of this content revolution, it seems like we\u2019ve left creators in the dust. That gorgeous longform template with infographics and parallax effects or that streamlined feed of latest news is a great experience for the user, but they can be a nightmare for those building them. Editors are often left to their own devices, forced to navigate clunky CMSes and connect the dots between form fields and what users will see. That\u2019s all starting to change. Medium was the first product to revolutionize both the writing and reading experience. Conferences and hackathons like ONA and SNDMakes help foster conversation and even create prototypes to improve the experience. The volume of content being produced, the speed at which users expect it, and the constantly growing list of platforms it\u2019s pushed to demands a system that empowers newsrooms instead of holding them back. It\u2019s not an easy task, especially for large-scale operations where writing and editing a story is just a small part of the challenge. In most cases, it can be broken down into a three-step process: Create : Let them write! Medium is the obvious example, but the writing and editing process requires an immersive experience that elevates the content. The visual and interactive presentation of a story isn\u2019t just the cherry on top anymore, and supplemental media like videos and images are an essential part of storytelling. Program : Landing pages, section fronts, news streams, related modules \u2014 the programming of a site or app requires editors to make quick decisions and know all the content available to them in real time. A five-minute delay in pushing a breaking story to the top of the homepage is an inefficiency that won\u2019t fly anymore. Push : For most news sites, the majority of users will first interact with their content on a third-party platform \u2014 Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, email, or beyond. It\u2019s increasingly important for editors to visualize how their content will be represented on these platforms, and to be able to push that content out efficiently. Media companies are finally realizing that content creators are their most important users. In 2015, we\u2019ll see organizations focus on empowering their creators with systems and interfaces that treat them as as such. Dheerja Kaur is senior product manager at ESPN.com.",
    "title": "Content creators are users too"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/disrupt-the-buzzword-backlash\/",
    "story": "Last year , my noob forecasting ruffled the feathers of exactly nobody. This year I hope to provoke discussion about the sharp edges of our industry \u2014 our tools that cut us when used inattentively. My predictions for 2015 are intentionally edgy. We\u2019re setting ourselves up for a very hard lesson in how much we encourage the Internet\u2019s trollish behavior while telling ourselves we\u2019re just reporting it. A surefire way to get the Internet to chatter about your story is to quote The Internet in your story. The worst behavior of online humans lurked within many 2014 news themes, emerging in forms like sockpuppet-amplified \u201coutrage\u201d and digital vigilantes bordering on lynch mobs . News mostly provided directly relevant , thoughtful reporting of The Internet\u2019s reactions \u2014 I\u2019ll bet few readers found stories quoting tweets jarring in any form. Yet some stories still gratuitously explain The Internet to the Internet, things like memes and lulz, as if they\u2019re chasing digital street cred. The Internet\u2019s only coherent, consistent plea to its citizens is \u201cdon\u2019t feed the trolls\u201d. Trolls lurked within more stories that I wanted to read in 2014. That list includes egregious cases like doxing and harassing women critiquing and advocating for greater diversity in video games and technology , Rolling Stone\u2019s UVA rape story backtracking and the women alleging a culture of sexual assault in college fraternities, harassing people tied (or misidentified as tied) to contentious news stories like Ferguson\u2019s civil disorder , and more. Yet similar themes merited mention, too, in the amusing, seemingly innocuous stories of backfired hashtag publicity stunts, like Jenny McCarthy\u2019s #JennyAsks . Vaccination supporters vocally regretted inadvertently publicizing McCarthy\u2019s fringe views, even couched in an amusing bit of digital disruption. The media\u2019s wink-nudge, \u201cwe get it\u201d smugness around things like #JennyAsks died (permanently, I hope) this fall, when people co-opted a publicity hashtag to force attention to longstanding rape allegations against Bill Cosby . A handful of widely shared, co-opted Twitter posts made many journalists \u2014 including those far less self-scrutinizing than Ta-Nehisi Coates \u2014 reconsider years of inaction on that story. From a broader viewpoint, we now have solid cases of news orgs being treated, as an entity, as good web citizens. Consider the huge audience and resonance of Serial \u2014 the show interacts with its Internet response with remarkable skill. Yet it, too, has a very sharp edge to it, as the first season\u2019s story concludes possibly unsatisfactorily. One wrong move could trigger a terrifying audience response, with serious, lawyer-asked questions about journalistic culpability. In 2015, I\u2019d love to see us discuss our reporting on Internet reactions and how disingenuous or bombastic the next case will be, as people test the edges of what we\u2019ll quote. I would like to see us seriously consider the relationship between little-t trollish \u201cI dare you to say X\u201d actions and how it can metastasize into capital-T Trolling and severe digital harassment . We\u2019ll slog through a counterproductive backlash to tech money\/leadership within journalistic ventures. By the end of 2014, the debate about incompatible cultures and language between tech dogma and journalistic tradition took center stage within the analysis of The New Republic\u2019s revolt . And Aaron Kushner\u2019s reversals at The Orange County Register . And my own paper\u2019s Innovation Report and editorial upheavals . Also NPR\u2019s shifting executives . And Bezos\u2019 Washington Post . And Andreessen Horowitz\u2019s venture investment in BuzzFeed \u2014 and so forth, etc. I\u2019m a member of a newsroom development team. Tech\u2019s buzzwords and maxims are my original professional vocabulary \u2014 they can indeed be ridiculous. Those of us blending both cultures understand that reaction, and we can go much deeper in making fun of it. We can recursively run that joke on the command line. But dismissing the point or the person in full because of buzzwords is denial. Calling it a justified backlash is an offensive gesture towards news staff who run the servers, write the software, hack the CMS, wrangle endless smartphone variations, promote news on ever-shifting tech platforms, and scramble to meet deadlines far more arbitrary than the tech industry itself. That\u2019s electing to use a meat cleaver as a nail trimmer. The same bingo drinking-game template works for tech\u2019s back-patting and journalism\u2019s navel-gazing. Journalism indulges its own buzzwords, dogma, and secret-handshake crap. And both industries would happily do away with \u201cstorytelling\u201d or \u201cdisruption,\u201d words diced and drained of any meaning by trite overexposure. I hope 2015 will see us discussing myopic business tactics and debating half-baked, Hail Mary ideas. However, I expect we\u2019ll jump to debating the backlash to the backlash \u2014 or, if tech comes out on top, the forked backlash. And we\u2019ll all cringe at the metaphor-bursting point where we find ourselves with a meta-backlash . Tiff Fehr is a data journalist at The New York Times.",
    "title": "Disrupt the buzzword backlash"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/managing-assets-across-platforms\/",
    "story": "The media business is at a crossroads. Print is threatened while growth is focused on digital, but operationally we\u2019re still not as integrated as we\u2019d like \u2014 and that\u2019s getting in the way of revenue growth for our publications. To future-proof the legacy media business, we need to reinvent how we create and sell our products. For those of us with one foot in the print world and the other online, we need new systems that enable us to write once, run anywhere, and move fast. Too many of us are painfully aware of having multiple systems that don\u2019t talk to one another, and the feeling of always playing \u201ccatch up\u201d to native digital competitors. 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 \u2014 enabling us to be more competitive. Here\u2019s how it could work: 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.\u00a0Web editors publish to this system. It\u2019s a new kind of CMS that isn\u2019t driven by the output format. We need to divorce the content from the display and destination. Just create the content and store it centrally. Content producers input the content into this database, making sure it is tagged and structured. We need a disciplined system around the use of tags and metadata. That starts with having a proper taxonomy that ensures content is categorized (e.g.: \u201cfeature\u201d, \u201cscience\u201d, \u201cbiology\u201d, \u201cbugs\u201d), something many media companies are still lacking. Now we\u2019re ready to create new products, and we can easily package and bundle assets based on any parameter. Say you want to create a science app. Select all your science stories and output them once a week to an app container. Or maybe you want the traditional monthly package of \u201ctop stories on a given theme.\u201d Either one would be viable. Next we add the template layer. Ideally we\u2019ve built toolkits with ready-made sizzle effects \u2014 wide-screen photo galleries, video embeds, parallax scrolling effects, distinct fonts, and pull quotes. We should build multiple templates that give us gorgeous displays, and don\u2019t require us to reinvent the wheel every time we have a great story to showcase.\u00a0Our new glorious system is plug and play. Lastly, with our new system, we can easily distribute these bundles to any partner, platform, or device.\u00a0Just set the price and send to any digital storefront. Our content should delight readers no matter which screen they choose. So, dear Santa, please bring me a new CMS for print and digital content \u2014 and don\u2019t forget to plug in a digital asset management system on the back end to track rights and permissions. Hayley Nelson is director of product management at Wired.",
    "title": "Managing assets across platforms"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/reporters-designers-and-developers-become-bffs\/",
    "story": "If you Google \u201cintegrated newsroom,\u201d you\u2019ll see loads of search results for articles, op-eds, presentations, academic papers, and even images of seating charts. ( This one makes me chuckle a little.) Everyone has their own definition of what this buzzword-y phrase means (as is often the case with buzzwords), but even so, I\u2019ll throw mine onto the pile: An \u201cintegrated newsroom\u201d is one in which reporters, designers, developers (and more) work closely, regularly, and happily together to develop features, apps, visuals, and tools. Media organizations are still trying to crack the code when it comes to building integrated newsrooms, and this will remain a major challenge in 2015. There are several newsrooms with visual\/graphics teams that are stunningly good at their jobs. But even with a dream team of developers, designers, and reporters outputting a formidable corpus of apps and editorial features, people and roles are still getting siloed \u2014 sometimes even silenced \u2014 in every newsroom. Vox Media, where I work as a developer, is still working towards building an integrated newsroom, but I think we\u2019re coming close. As a relatively young company built from and firmly grounded in technology , there are of course many factors that make us slightly better positioned to do so. To compare our position to a large newspaper is unfair; they have to think about print alongside digital, and have larger newsrooms with all the bureaucratic trappings that come with such scale. Even so, I think there are a few lessons that can still be drawn from our experience and challenges in building an integrated newsroom culture at Vox Media. How does a newsroom become integrated? I can only speak from personal experience, so first I\u2019ll lay out some disclaimers. I\u2019ve only worked in one newsroom, and even at Vox Media, I\u2019m not officially a developer dedicated to any editorial team. I don\u2019t sit in the Vox.com or SB Nation editorial bullpen in D.C. We do have an editorial apps team that works across all seven of our verticals to produce special features, as well as a developer solely dedicated to building web apps for Vox.com. My day-to-day work is primarily in building out our branded and native advertising content and platforms. But I think that makes my point even more salient: Although I\u2019m not officially a newsroom\/editorial developer, I\u2019ve still gotten a glimpse of what it\u2019s like to work in such a collaborative and integrated environment. So here\u2019s my single, most important tip for building a truly integrated newsroom: Talk to one another. And maybe become BFFs. Educate, empathize, and encourage. Many of our writers come from organizations where developers were either nonexistent or huddled in a dark, shadowy corner somewhere. And on the flip side, many of our developers have never worked with journalists or in newsrooms. As a result, perceptions exist \u2014 so break them down. Journalists: Developers and designers aren\u2019t some alien breed of taco-devouring robots. They might not understand why you spelled \u201ched\u201d that way, but they might have a neat way to digest and visualize all that data you\u2019ve been staring at. And developers: Journalists aren\u2019t some alien breed of unfriendly nerds. They may have a seed of an idea that could spark the creation of an app that will use that cool new JavaScript library you\u2019ve wanted to try out. You both work in the same place: Talk to each other. That said, it\u2019s also important to build a culture where developers and designers aren\u2019t forced into a position to \u201cserve\u201d the needs of writers and reporters. This is tricky, because I think we often see the content creation process as being content first, with all the \u201cproduction stuff\u201d (visuals, interactives, etc.) coming last. But creating an integrated newsroom doesn\u2019t mean establishing an effective and efficient way for developers to build stuff out for writers\u2019 content. It means building a culture where developers and writers can work together, in parallel, to solve a common problem and tell a story together . Have respect for one another, get all parties involved early in the process, and you\u2019ll have way more fun that way. The last point is encouragement. We have many editors at Vox who consistently encourage those on the product team to contribute writing and content to the website. This signals to me, as a developer, that my ideas are being heard and that I have a real opportunity to contribute to the site, whether that\u2019s through a written article or a web app. Break down walls and empower people. Not physical walls (although you could do that too!) \u2014 I mean the walls of communication, walls of process, walls of bureaucracy. These have their purposes, but when building an integrated newsroom culture, they can impede more than help. Process and good management are important and necessary for producing a thing, but in the idea-origination stage of writing and developing, they can hinder. Let chaos breed some creativity. At Vox Media, one tool of communication we use to break down such walls is Slack, the increasingly popular internal chat tool. Slack allows you to create as many chatrooms as you\u2019d like. We create public chatrooms for most things and encourage people to join any room they wish. I don\u2019t like pointing to one single tool as a silver bullet (your culture needs to complement the tool), but I truly believe this is one of the reasons why our team has become as collaborative, creative, and integrated as it is currently. Conversations in Slack range from serious to completely lol-worthy (gifs, bots , etc.). What\u2019s great is that good (even genius) ideas can spring from either type of conversation. You\u2019d be surprised at how many jokes in Slack have evolved into real stories or features on our sites. One recent example of such a project is the Serial podcast app we built. After some discussion about the latest episode in our cross-company Serial chatroom (yes, we have one), a few people mentioned it might be a great opportunity to build an app that could serve as a \u201cguide\u201d to all the people mentioned in the podcast. Developers, designers, and writers from Vox all worked together on wireframing, designing, building, and gathering content. Five days later, an app was born. Sure, most everyone who worked on the app worked on it outside of their normal work projects and assignments. But working with a \u201cflex\u201d team of people who had never worked together before, on a project we were all very passionate about, was not only a blast but also helped educate and reinforce the idea that we work in an environment where such rogue projects are totally acceptable and encouraged. If someone has an idea, they should feel empowered to run with it. Having an editor sign off on an idea should be a five-minute chat, not a days-long process. Getting an app set up should be a few hours\u2019 worth of a developer\u2019s time, not a several-week process of giving that person the right credentials or authorization on your system. (At Vox Media, most developers know how to set up an editorial app and have permission to do so.) Breaking down these structural impediments helps us build cool things faster. What are the challenges of building an integrated newsroom? Building this type of integrated culture isn\u2019t easy. First and foremost, input and output are often at odds with one another. A reporter may want one thing. The developer may understand better the technical constraints of that thing and know she won\u2019t have time to build it out and meet deadline, so she may have another thing in mind. This challenge merely boils down to perspective, process, and communication. Building a great app or tool is a team effort, and everyone should feel involved early on. Second, it turns out that deadlines are not super fun. Building out interactive apps and visualizations for breaking news is incredibly difficult, though some newsrooms are doing it well. To get around this, start with evergreen pitches first to get a feel for a collaborative process without the burden of meeting a looming deadline. Lastly, scaling and sustaining this type of integrated culture is difficult. Our company has had success so far because the size of our team is relatively small compared to others. All members of editorial and product sit on the same floor in our D.C. office, allowing communication to be natural and easy. Aside from building an integrated newsroom culture, the challenge of scaling such a culture could be one of the most difficult we face in 2015 and in the coming years. Alisha Ramos is a front-end designer at Vox Media.",
    "title": "Reporters, designers, and developers become BFFs"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-capital-hook\/",
    "story": "All those Bitcoin startups will be on the hook to launch their products. As a result, venture capital, after its brief dalliance with the media industry, will forget about content and return to its first love, totally imaginary markets. Paul Ford is a writer, editor, programmer, and creator of tilde.club .",
    "title": "The capital hook"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/metrics-smaller-screens-and-race\/",
    "story": "Metrics : New key metrics will rise to the forefront. The lauded pageview is being eclipsed by measurements of engagement and influence. New tools will emerge that will gauge social interaction with content and content creators. Smaller screens : The debut of the Apple Watch this year will compel us to think more about how to produce engaging content for even smaller screens, for audiences on the go, for glance functionality. What news can we deliver in a glimpse? Race : In light of the Ferguson shooting and national protests against police violence, race and issues of inequality will continue to be hot topics for news coverage in 2015. Massive social campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe have focused global media\u2019s attention on socioeconomic, cultural and political realities affecting communities of color. What should media\u2019s next move be? Mira Lowe is senior editor for features at CNN Digital.",
    "title": "Metrics, smaller screens, and race"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-year-of-the-reader\/",
    "story": "You\u2019re under pressure to grow audience, to get your newsrooms to \u201cthink more digitally,\u201d to dazzle with innovation and to, surely and not lastly, break news and produce the best journalism your organization has ever seen. In digital news, we\u2019ve all spent our share of time chasing the shiny new thing \u2014 that\u2019s part of the job. You\u2019re required to be in the moment, with the story or with the latest trend to draws users in. Sometimes things align and you can do both. Then the landscape shifts under your feet again. There exists a collective exhaustion across all journo Twitter; you\u2019re burning out and you\u2019ve really just started. Behold the promise of 2015: The year of the reader. The year news organizations will rightly put a premium on their most engaged users. And the year you get to focus on excellence. Why? Well, the audiences are here: People are reading lots of news\u2026on their phones. Mobile traffic is up dramatically across news organizations. And that growth seems to be increasing overall news consumption. Young people are reading more mobile news. The year-over-year growth for 18- to 34-year-olds is up in a big way. Native products = highly engaged users. Native app users are spending over twice the amount of time as web users and generally consuming many more pieces of content. Users will pay for something they value \u2014 either with their time or with their money. Digital subscriptions are growing and in place at over 500 newspaper websites in the U.S. With the massive growth of mobile news readers, highly engaged audiences, and willing subscribers, there\u2019s reason to be excited about the now and the future of news. So how will media companies apply some of these shifts? Below are a few thoughts. And if I\u2019m wrong? It will only mean delivering excellent digital journalism to our most loyal readers. You want people to come back. Purely chasing pageviews is a fool\u2019s errand. In the short term, it gets you a bigger comScore number. But those calories are empty. Readers come back because they value what happened when they were there last. Give them two things: Good content and good experience. You need that combination to grow user loyalty. Learn to strongly dislike any experience that detracts from your stories. Put someone in charge of ridding your products of any obstacles to consuming journalism. Or at least put someone in charge of doing an audit, and then prioritizing anything that helps users over those that turn them away. Pick your key products, then present your best journalism on them. You can\u2019t dominate on every single platform with finite resources. You must select your key targets, the platforms your most loyal audiences consume you on, and then build the best experience you possibly can to serve up your work. (See above on apps.) Get your mobile house in order, stat. Mobile growth is stunning. But a one-size-fits-all approach to handle all content can hurt us on these growing platforms. I\u2019ve heard more than a few cases of responsive design killed my mobile engagement numbers . You suddenly have more readers on mobile than on your desktop \u2014 but what about the rest of the key metrics? Time on site. Pages per visit. Return visits. If those numbers drop as your visitors increase, it\u2019s time to question whether the overall experience works. Remember, the biggest growth in young audiences \u2014 which are also new audiences \u2014 is in mobile. The only thing we should be chasing in 2015 is news. Readers are here, especially on the phone. The challenge is to engage them even further. This is a fantastic journalistic opportunity, one that is different than begging them to come once. If we do what we love, journalism and the creation of excellent experiences to deliver that, the signs point to these readers sticking around for more. So let\u2019s give them our best. They deserve it, and so do we. Cory Haik is executive producer and senior editor for digital news at The Washington Post.",
    "title": "The year of the reader"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/news-organizations-get-serious-about-research\/",
    "story": "I have a confession to make: What you are about to read is as much a plea as it is a prediction. But in the spirit of the holiday season, I trust you will not shy away from reading an analysis written from a place of hope. Historically, news organizations have invested a very small portion of their revenues in research. And the little that they have invested has been mostly devoted to a kind of market research with very clear short-term goals and a narrow focus \u2014 the opposite of the type of more long-term and broadly focused research that sometimes leads to nothing, but other times yields useful product or process improvements, and once in a while is the backbone of major breakthroughs. I remember a speech by Bob Cauthorn at an industry gathering in the late 1990s, when he was still at the Arizona Daily Star. He scolded his fellow media executives for spending so little on R&D in comparison to the levels of expenditures of large organizations in other mature sectors of the economy. His remarks were received with welcoming applause. But one could see the disinterest in the eyes of his peers. Back then, traditional media organizations still had healthy profit margins; the founders of Google and Facebook were still in school. Nowadays, traditional media organizations are fighting for their existence \u2014 a scaled down version of it, compared to that enjoyed by the executives Bob addressed at that meeting less than a generation ago \u2014 while Google and Facebook have become regular destinations for doctoral students in a number of disciplines, including graduates from our program. Do companies like Google and Facebook hire PhDs and routinely fund external projects because they see themselves in the research business or want to expand into higher education? No \u2014 they do it because they are convinced that investing in R&D is essential to remain relevant in a knowledge economy, especially one in which the pace of innovation has greatly accelerated and whose future direction has become increasingly uncertain. News organizations used to get by with minimal research expenditures because, for most of the second half of the 20th century, they had major profits and operated in fairly stable markets. This environment was also hospitable to the skepticism among journalists about the value of media research undertaken by social and behavioral scientists. This attitude of \u201cwe know better\u201d contrasts with the deference that journalists have traditionally displayed towards research about almost any other topic. We can call it a turf war and agree it was tolerable when times were good. But now that the survival of journalism is at stake and those winning the battle for the public\u2019s attention \u2014 and advertising dollars, which usually follow that attention \u2014 are research-intensive enterprises, that kind of turf war has become between stupid and suicidal. But there are recent glimmers of hope, both inside news organizations and in their external relationships with universities and other relevant parties. The R&D unit at The New York Times is a promising example of the kind of innovative work that can emerge when a news organization is not focused only on tomorrow\u2019s deadline but also on the medium-term horizon. Last year, Tom Rosenstiel at the American Press Institute and Jack Hamilton at Louisiana State University began convening a task force composed of industry and academic leaders aimed to foster research-focused collaborations. I participated in two meetings of this task force and was delighted to see a transformation from the historical attitude of skepticism to a contemporary tone of engagement. But this engagement was hindered by an industry position of \u201cwhat can you do for us?\u201d Until this position \u2014 representative of that held by many journalists \u2014 shifts to \u201cwhat can we do together?\u201d it\u2019s unlikely that fruitful partnerships will develop. I hope 2015 will be remembered as the year that news organizations got serious about research. If that\u2019s the case, it will be a major step forward for them towards regaining a position of relevance within the knowledge economy. If it isn\u2019t, they will continue chronicling that economy from the sidelines, including many more stories about their own steady and painful decline. Pablo Boczkowski is a professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University.",
    "title": "News organizations get serious about research"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/text-plus-not-post-text\/",
    "story": "When I joined the BuzzFeed News team, Ben Smith described me as \u201ca person who comes from the Internet.\u201d I could hear the scoffs from the far reaches of curmudgeon Twitter, a social network extremely well suited to people who traffic in words and wit and pith. But I do come from the Internet. I built my first webpage sometime in the late 1990s, artisanally: hand coded in HTML and rudimentary CSS in a text document, and then uploaded via FTP to the Unix box of a friend I\u2019d met on a local IRC channel, the Slack of that era. It featured angst-ridden teenaged poetry and a password-protected \u201cweblog\u201d as well as a guestbook \u2014 the original comments \u2014 and a visitor counter. This was a time of Usenet, of bulletin board systems, of dialup accessed via 14.4k modems, of dot matrix printers and files shared via floppy disk. This was a time of text \u2014 even the art was ASCII then. (Though there were already gifs.) But the future, to quote Financial Times editor Lionel Barber , is \u201ctext-plus.\u201d To succeed in this future, media organizations must become fluent in an increasingly visual idiom. Instagram, a social network designed to turn everyone into a food stylist, added 100 million users in the last nine months. There are more hours of video uploaded to Facebook and YouTube than there are books in the Library of Congress. There are startups built on gifs and emojis. There are few jobs buzzier than those which include the words \u201cvisual\u201d and \u201cstoryteller.\u201d Photographers, photo editors, and stalwarts of the picture desk, rejoice. We need you now, again, and more than ever. But for all that, we are not quite \u201cpost-text.\u201d For the billions of people whose Internet is very much like the one I grew up with \u2014 sporadic if available; delivered through underpowered devices with limited and slow data packages, if any \u2014 the text message is still king. What is the future if not unevenly distributed? Stacy-Marie Ishmael is editor of BuzzFeed\u2019s upcoming news app.",
    "title": "Text-plus, not post-text"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-facebook-as-a-traffic-engine\/",
    "story": "Virtually every digital publisher has seen two big trends in recent years: Traffic is up sharply, and mobile traffic is up spectacularly, often overtaking the desktop web. In both cases, the cause can be distilled down to a single word: Facebook. But what Facebook giveth, Facebook can taketh away. (Just ask Zynga.) And 2015 is going to be the year that it starts doing exactly that. Facebook has two natural constituencies: its advertisers and its users. It has no particular use for third-party publishers, except insofar as links to those publishers make its users happy, and keep them coming back for more such links. But Facebook is now a mobile company \u2014 most of its users are mobile, most of its revenue comes from mobile, and the proportions coming from the desktop are certain to continue to shrink. And in a mobile world, links to third-party websites are, to use a technical term, shit. What\u2019s more, Facebook\u2019s algorithm is already working overtime on trying to slim down a virtually infinite range of possible News Feed posts to a much smaller number. A significant chunk of the NewsFeed is already ads, so in order to make it into the News Feed if you\u2019re not an ad, you need to be really, really good. Like, one close friend announcing her engagement, or a video of another friend pouring a bucket of ice water over her head, or a long and hilarious comment thread on a third friend\u2019s status update. What\u2019s not really, really good? A link to some random website which has a user experience which Facebook can\u2019t control, and which is probably suboptimal on mobile. In 2015, then, the winners of the Facebook attention lottery are going to be more videos, as well as genuinely native, in-app content from advertisers. The losers are going to be external websites who have become reliant on the Facebook traffic firehose. That traffic is going to start falling, in 2015, for the first time. And the repercussions are likely to be huge. Felix Salmon is senior editor at Fusion.",
    "title": "The beginning of the end of Facebook\u2019s traffic engine"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/from-walls-to-canals\/",
    "story": "Competition is the merciless propelling force of this new era of journalism \u2014 and in the year ahead that will only intensify. It\u2019s a beautiful thing, though of course not everyone will win. To spot future winners and losers, watch the following issues: The \u201cChinese wall\u201d cannot be the only concept governing relations between newsrooms and business. Yes, there should be clear principles and rules in place that prevent advertising or other special interests from influencing news coverage. Unassailable credibility of news reporting and analysis is a must for serious news organizations. Yet that cannot mean that newsrooms shut out commerce, or that journalists disengage when it comes to building or rebuilding the successful media companies of tomorrow. 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. The spectrum of journalists\u2019 salaries will widen. The sheer number of new initiatives has made competition for talent more intense. And greater visibility of journalists\u2019 individual audiences, impact, and output has made it easier than ever before to help determine the value of a journalist to an organization. Together, those two factors will force news organizations to manage both talent and costs more wisely: News organizations really are talent agencies, and talent comes in different forms and levels \u2014 reward structures should reflect that better. Top reporters who are outperforming competitors should see their salaries go up. For many others, this will not be so. News organizations that get this balance right will be leaner and able to focus on where to pack a punch. 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\u2019re left with a whole bunch of clicks \u2014 and a gaping hole in lieu of a meaningful brand. Tools and methods to build digital audiences, from sophisticated analytics to headline styles and story formats, are now available to and embraced by (almost) all newsrooms, not just by those of pioneers and startups. But what may work for some does not work for all. With the same toolkits widely available to all, the battle for audience is pivoting back to the core, the unique identity of content \u2014 the quality of journalism. Those newsrooms that have a firm grasp of their audience and their own mission are more likely to thrive; those with less self-awareness may meet a lesser fate. Collaborative newsrooms will produce more remarkable journalism. Collaboration between coders, designers, and reporters is already more common than it ever was (and an increasing number of reporters and editors carry all those skills in one). We\u2019ll of course see much more of that in time to come. 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 \u201cservice centers.\u201d Newsrooms that accommodate this shift will attract and retain better talent, and will produce the best journalism. All in all, stiffer competition will force tough choices in the coming year. We should welcome that. Almar Latour is executive editor of The Wall Street Journal.",
    "title": "From walls to canals"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/u-s-tech-gets-more-political-worldwide\/",
    "story": "In 2015, the role of private, for-profit, spectacularly successful, incredibly useful, and more and more powerful U.S.-based digital intermediaries will become an increasingly politicized issue around the world. As companies like Google and Facebook become more and more important for news media, these political discussions have considerable potential impact on journalism, but ultimately the relationship between digital intermediaries and media companies is only one corner of a larger dispute involving antitrust concerns, tax issues, privacy, and security questions \u2014 as well as a wide variety of different political and economic interests at stake from country to country. Right now, most of the attention is focused on Google, which in more and more countries is a more common way of finding news online than using branded websites. At home in the U.S., Google has a market share of between 60 and 70 percent, but in many other countries, that share is over 90 percent. It\u2019s a major driver of traffic to many news websites, with both editorial and commercial implications. It also accounts for more than 30 percent of all online advertising globally, according to some estimates , and of course operates a whole portfolio of different services beyond search. But in the future, the attention is bound to turn to Facebook too, and probably others. Social networking sites are becoming more and more important as gateways to news , rivaling search engines and branded websites in some countries. Facebook is far and away the market leader and another major driver of traffic. It too, increasingly, plays a dominant role in online advertising, with close to 8 percent of the global market in 2014. Like Google, it operates a wide variety of services, and Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s stated intention of building \u201cthe perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world\u201d has sent a shudder through the news industry. Digital intermediaries like search engines and social networking sites are powerful frenemies for news organizations. They can help reach wider audiences \u2014 but they also compete directly and indirectly for attention, advertising, and data, and with their growing reliance on search engines and social media, media organizations increasingly find themselves in the uncomfortable position of no longer controlling the main conduits through which stories reach audiences. In some countries, legacy media organizations have turned to national governments as part of their reaction to the rise of the digital intermediaries. Because the most talked-about examples of public and politicized legacy media vs. Google disputes have been from France ( newspapers ), Germany (especially Axel Springer ), and the U.K. ( Rupert Murdoch ), it\u2019s easy to caricature this as an old world vs. new world matter \u2014 and many have. This is misleading, however, as Hollywood\u2019s evident worry over the growing power of a company code-named \u201cGoliath\u201d shows. U.S.-based companies also have things to think about, whether they are legacy or digital natives. (Look at what Google\u2019s \u201cPanda\u201d update did to many content farms .) Digital intermediaries like Google and Facebook thus increasingly face political issues both at home and abroad. Both \u2014 especially Google \u2014 have in response been ramping up lobbying and PR efforts in both Washington , in Brussels , and other national capitals and is also making an effort to reach out to news media and work with them. Just as the popular and commercial success of Google and Facebook is virtually global, so are the questions raised by the increasingly powerful position they occupy in the media environment. But because the answers are in part political, and (much) politics is local, the reactions are likely to vary from country to country. In 2015, we\u2019ll see this discussion intensify and develop. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.",
    "title": "U.S. tech gets more political worldwide"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/living-on-borrowed-time\/",
    "story": "In 2010, in the fairly early days of Twitter as a tool for news organizations, ProPublica received a tweet saying \u201cthis is a depressing, but excellent site.\u201d It is in that spirit (I hope) that I offer my prediction amid the joy of the holidays. The economy seems finally to be shifting into a higher gear. Job creation is way up, oil prices are way down, GDP is projected to grow robustly in the near term, the deficit is shrinking, and the health care cost curve continues to bend down a bit. In other words, legacy publishers may be about to make a(nother) big mistake. An improving economy should improve publishing results. Advertising, which remains a fundamentally cyclical business, may recover a bit (although the secular trends of reallocating ad dollars away from legacy publishing will also continue). Circulation revenue may benefit from loosening wallets, especially digitally and among younger consumers. So far, of course, so good. But there will be a strong temptation at newspapers and magazines to see this as a respite after ten long years of pain \u2014 to pay dividends, perhaps, or re-inflate profit margins somewhat. And that would be a tragic error. Legacy publishing remains in secular decline. And precisely because advertising is a cyclical business, the worst of that decline probably remains ahead. 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\u2019re already about a year and a half overdue for a recession. Whenever that recession comes \u2014 and it now seems likely it won\u2019t be too soon \u2014 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\u2019t return to legacy publishers in the subsequent recovery. 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 \u201cdigital first\u201d in more than just rhetoric. Resisting the temptation to greater profit now could go some ways to mitigating loss later. Richard J. Tofel is president of ProPublica and was formerly assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal.",
    "title": "Living on borrowed time"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/160-characters-is-the-new-140-characters\/",
    "story": "Jamie Mottram is director of content development at the USA TODAY Sports Media Group, which includes the viral sports site For The Win .",
    "title": "160 characters is the new 140 characters"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/finding-the-right-form\/",
    "story": "Over the past few years, I\u2019ve watched visual storytelling explode across journalism. From The New York Times to The Atlantic to BuzzFeed, I\u2019ve seen traditionally text-based colleagues and outlets embrace new visual forms, whether they\u2019re building beautiful interactive data visualizations or launching ambitious new video units. I\u2019m pleased to see this visual exploration not just because I\u2019m a documentary filmmaker who lives and breathes in the visual world. I\u2019m enthusiastic about what it signals: innovation in the way journalists are approaching storytelling. We\u2019re thinking about how to tell stories from the outset not in terms of video vs. audio vs. text, or short-form vs. long-form \u2014 but in terms of whatever the right form may be. Maybe a piece of reporting is a visceral, visually compelling story that\u2019s meant to be a documentary. Maybe it will unfold with the most impact as a really thoughtful written piece. Maybe it\u2019s an interactive combination of both. I\u2019m seeing a new openness to this sort of right-form experimentation among journalists, and in 2015, I believe we will see this exploration expand. As a result, we\u2019ll see more and more visual storytelling breakthroughs in unexpected places. My hope is that documentary journalists will challenge themselves as well, and move boldly toward interactive, innovative visual storytelling \u2014 something we\u2019ll be experimenting with here at Frontline . We\u2019ve always been committed to the documentary, and we believe the form, with its immersive power to take audiences to places they\u2019ve never been, will endure for a very long time. But technology is catching up with some of our journalistic visions in thought-provoking ways. As a MIT Open Doc Fellow this year, I\u2019ve been exploring the storytelling opportunities presented by virtual reality technologies like Oculus Rift. We haven\u2019t seen this approach applied frequently in current affairs documentaries \u2014 but in 2015, we\u2019ll be working with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Secret Location to see if it will work for Frontline\u2019s audience. Will virtual reality deliver a journalism experience and immerse our audience in the story in a way we couldn\u2019t before? Or will it feel too intrusive? We don\u2019t have the answers yet. But we do have the tools and technologies at our fingertips to be creative, and to translate our journalistic instincts and imperatives forward in meaningful ways. Coupled with more and more buy-in for innovation and right-form thinking inside journalism, the moment we\u2019re in feels like something of a renaissance. I\u2019m thrilled to be part of it. Raney Aronson-Rath is deputy executive producer of Frontline.",
    "title": "Finding the right form"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-year-we-get-creeped-out-by-algorithms\/",
    "story": "It turns out computers have a built-in \u201cuncanny valley\u201d (that creepy feeling android robots generate when they kind of look human). Just like we don\u2019t want robots too human-shaped \u2014 we want them to know their place \u2014 it turns out we aren\u2019t too happy when our computers go from \u201csmart\u201d (as in automating things and connecting us to each other or information) to \u201csmart\u201d (as in \u201clet me make that decision for you\u201d). Algorithmic judgment is the uncanny valley of computing. Algorithms (basically computer programs, but here I\u2019m talking about the complex subset that is being used to calculate results of some consequence, which then shape our experience) have become more visible in 2014, and it turns out we\u2019re creeped out. The most visible, cited, discussed academic article of 2014 was one which exposed the fact that Facebook uses algorithms to manipulate its News Feed \u2014 something a majority of people apparently did not know. Most of the discussion was outrage: The lead author received hundreds of disgusted emails asking how dare he manipulate our social interactions on Facebook; the reality, of course, is that\u2019s what Facebook does every day, algorithmically. The Facebook experiment made visible what was always there, and raised more questions than it could answer. 2015 looks to be the year when we start grappling with the power and role of these complex algorithms \u2014 sometimes discussed as machine learning or artificial intelligence \u2014 and when a thousand more startups (and big companies, since they have a data advantage in fueling these types of algorithms) start trying to \u201cdeploy\u201d them not just in apps and sites, but in our devices and objects as chips and sensors become more prevalent. We\u2019ve had computers for more than a century. What\u2019s the new development? Three things, and all are significant. One: Our devices are becoming more and more central to our social, personal, financial, and civic interactions. That feels like old news, but it\u2019s barely a decade old, and the rate of expansion to the next few billion is still rapid. Digital mediation is now widespread enough to make algorithms widely consequential. Two: Most digital mediation takes place on platforms and apps in which the true owner, the platform itself, keeps centralized control. This is a new kind of ownership\/user experience. Think of a world in which your phone constantly checked in with the central phone company to decide which of your relatives it should allow you to call, and to jumble their sentences around in any order it deemed \u201cbetter\u201d (to keep you \u201cengaged\u201d and on the phone longer) \u2014 and served you ads in the middle? That\u2019s many of your platforms today. We no longer truly own our intermediaries; instead they are guided by an invisible, algorithmic layer that neither answers to nor is accountable to us. No wonder we\u2019re creeped out. Three: Algorithms are increasingly being deployed to make decisions where there is no right answer, only a judgment call. Google says it\u2019s showing us the most relevant results, and Facebook aims to show us what\u2019s most important. But what\u2019s relevant? What\u2019s important? Unlike other forms of automation or algorithms where there\u2019s a definable right answer, we\u2019re seeing the birth of a new era, the era of judging machines: machines that calculate not just how to quickly sort a database, or perform a mathematical calculation, but to decide what is \u201cbest,\u201d \u201crelevant,\u201d \u201cappropriate,\u201d or \u201charmful.\u201d It\u2019s one thing to ask a computer the answer to a factoring problem, or the quickest driving path from point A to point B \u2014 it\u2019s another to have a computer decide for us who among our friends is most \u201crelevant\u201d to us, or what piece of news is of most importance, or who should be hired (or fired). Deep philosophical questions that humans have debated for millennia \u2014 and have erected complex (and far from perfect) gatekeeping, credentialing, and judging apparatus to grapple with \u2014 are now being asked to computers, and their answers, spat out through proprietary and opaque systems, are being used to shape our lives. The spread of algorithmic judgment is much more significant than whether Big Blue beats Kasparov at chess, a game that was always unwieldy for humans and suitable for machine computation. Machines have out-muscled us for centuries and out-computed us for decades. Now they are going to judge for us, instead of us, and out-judge us. And 2015 looks to be the year this becomes visible, widespread. Will it become even creepier? And will there be a backlash? That\u2019s probably for 2016. Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina\u2019s School of Information and Library Science.",
    "title": "The year we get creeped out by algorithms"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/crowdsourcing-the-future-of-news\/",
    "story": "I usually make all of my work public and transparent and involve the audience on a daily basis (on Twitter and\u00a0on the Social Sandbox ). So when Nieman Lab asked me to make a news industry prediction for 2015, I decided this should be no different: I emailed 40 people who don\u2019t work in news and asked for their 2015 news predictions. I also asked Facebook and Twitter. Here are some of the responses I got, as well as my own at the end: Nick Disabato , a designer from Chicago: \u201cMore and more, news outlets are relying on third-party traffic sources, like search engines and social media, for most of their readership. As a result, readers have become more flighty, less likely to support a specific outlet for long. I bet you\u2019re going to see a lot of organizations live or die by their ability to communicate beyond their own immediate purview.\u201d Rob Shore , a videographer in D.C.: \u201cWhile budgets continue to thin for content creation in general, as technology gets cheaper and know how gets deeper, talking heads, data visualization, and the combination of the two will become more and more of a priority.\u201d Christine Eriksen , an avid knitter and account manager in Philly: \u201cI am always looking for news written or curated by people of color and\/or women.\u00a0Additionally, I think that television news is untrustworthy and from the white\/male perspective.\u00a0There is a lot of momentum in the black community about news and how people of color are presented. Though, of course, this will be a slow change, in 2015 we will see more non-white perspectives finding their own way to deliver the news.\u201d Additionally, since Serial is the podcast that has broken the Internet lately, it has shown me that people are starting to take podcasts and content exclusively created for the Internet seriously who hadn\u2019t before. This combination will create a new way of delivering news by people who can now deliver their stories from their world for little to no money.\u201d Christopher Brown, a psychologist who works with the military in Fairbanks, Alaska: \u201cI predict that Vice News will become a major player, based on getting access to interviews and embeds that others avoid, don\u2019t think of, or are denied.\u201d Matt Crespi , a public policy Ph.D. student who lives in Pittsburgh, sent me six lengthy predictions. My favorite was this one: \u201cHeadlines will get dumber.\u00a0For 10 reasons why this is true, plus a special bonus reason that will leave you speechless, click here.\u201d (The rest of Matt\u2019s predictions are here .) Alyssa Dingwall , an avid baker in Connecticut: \u201cAudiences will be the largest challenge the news industry faces in 2015. Readers are fickle, and want stories that are comprehensive yet concise, and they want them immediately. Now that more and more companies are entering the industry, every entity will have to fight to get and keep readers interested and coming back.\u201d Ben Novack , a software engineer in Philadelphia: \u201cMy prediction is that news will get a lot worse before it gets better. What I mean by that: I don\u2019t think anyone\u2019s on the verge of actually figuring out a new business model (i.e., not overwhelmingly ad-dependent) for news that\u2019s sustainable and rewards actual news instead of playing nice with the folks who pay the bills (i.e., advertisers.) We\u2019ll see a lot more \u2018native advertising\u2019 and similar skeeviness that will continue to degrade the trustworthiness of major news organizations. We\u2019ll continue to see a lot of really cool ideas about how to present news and pull information out of raw data; we\u2019ll see no real advances in how to sustainably fund those ideas.\u201d Zack Noyce , a librarian in Salt Lake City: \u201cI predict there will be at least two widely-shared articles each declaring the following: (1) we are living in the golden age of podcasting and (2) the podcast moment is over. And WAY too much ink will be spilled debating whether Stephen Colbert is the messiah of network late night or he never should have left Comedy Central.\u201d Robyn Kramer , who is my mom and lives in South Jersey: \u201cI think people my age are going to figure out how to use that Twitter. I still can\u2019t figure it out. You know what cracks me up? When people start following me. I only answer you. I don\u2019t even know how to make it tweet. It\u2019s clear that genetics didn\u2019t play a role in your career choice.\u201d And Neil Kramer, who is my dad and doesn\u2019t really use computers: \u201cYou ask hard questions. Mom is laughing. The news industry. Well, everyone\u2019s going to be getting the news on their phones. I don\u2019t know. Huh. What\u2019s happening with the news industry? Give me a hint. Let\u2019s see. Um, the news, I\u2019m happy with it but it\u2019s too repetitive right now, but that\u2019s not a prediction. What\u2019s on at 6:00 is on at 7:00 and is on at 11:00. They don\u2019t update. Mom says I\u2019m going to watch the news less often because it\u2019s so repetitive. I\u2019m watching it less.\u201d As for my predictions for 2015, I say three things: Someone\u2019s going to develop a better (and hopefully open source) audio format than MP3 that will allow people to assess how and when people are listening to audio \u2014 meaning everyone won\u2019t have to develop their own proprietary players to collect data about their audience. News organizations will realize \u2014 even more so than they do now \u2014 that aggregation is considerably cheaper than content creation , and will devote considerable resources towards aggregating the work of their peers, thus making it more even difficult to hear newer or different voices, because everyone will be rehashing each other\u2019s work. And a hopeful prediction: We will not judge our audiences for consuming the news in a different way that we do , realizing that the more we include the audience in our process, the better our news gathering will be. Melody Kramer is a digital strategist and editor at NPR and an upcoming 2015 Visiting Nieman Fellow.",
    "title": "Crowdsourcing the future of news"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/beyond-journalism-in-the-present-tense\/",
    "story": "A Hollywood director couldn\u2019t have scripted a more compelling (and stereotypical) clash between two sets of journalistic beliefs than this month\u2019s battle between the staff of The New Republic and its owner Chris Hughes. On the one side, a deep commitment to humanistic inquiry embodied in the liberal arts. On the other, the data-oriented, metric- and innovation-obsessed culture of Silicon Valley. If a \u201cliberal arts\u201d perspective on politics and intellectual life can be defined, in the helpful words of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat , as a refusal of \u201cthe delusion\u2026that today\u2019s fashions represent permanent truths,\u201d than we should expect this journalistic battle to accelerate on the year to come. But it also might not matter \u2014 because while the cultural commentariat tweets its dismay (at either the cluelessness of the elbow-patch wearing literary crowd or the disruption-minded buffoonery of the entrepreneurs of the Valley), other writers and editors are plotting new ways to rethink the journalistic embrace of what I like to call \u201cslow thinking.\u201d These writers and editors, at publications large and small, will help point toward a synthesis of old and new journalistic cultures in the year ahead. Full disclosure: I personally have a great deal of sympathy with the more considered (some might say more ponderous) and certainly more historically inclined journalism that was once embodied (though not embodied all that well for many decades) by magazines like The New Republic. But there are two problems with this culture of literary pretension. The first might be called the canonical backlash problem; the second has to do with cult of metrics and money that dominates so much journalism today. First, the canonical backlash: No one who was on a college campus in the 1990s can fail to appreciate Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019 evisceration of the racial politics of The New Republic as anything other than a most welcome extension of the battles over \u201cthe canon\u201d and \u201crepresentation\u201d that have dominated university life for the past three decades. The \u201cliberal arts\u201d embodied by magazines like TNR is my white, male, Protestant liberal arts; it is not the culture and art of most of America today, never mind the majority of the globe. And thus, even the most ardent defenders of The New Republic this month had to admit that, well, it was all fairly musty smelling, wasn\u2019t it? Disruption might do it some good. The second problem is deeper and more systemic. It is not the existence of reader data and user metrics that threatens slower, more considered, more humanistically inclined journalistic endeavors. Rather, it is the managerial and organizational culture that so often surrounds and interprets these metrics. It is less that, in and of themselves, metrics, audience trackers, and the ability to measure how well stories travel threatens the values of journalism. The problem is rather the way we have come to uncritically vaunt and value the importance of numbers, the expectations that we have of them, and the way our embrace of audience data under the rubric of democracy and empowerment often disguises a bluntly economic imperative. Data is not the problem \u2014 it\u2019s 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. Still, all is not lost. For even as some might wail and bemoan the fact that so much of journalistic production now exists in present tense, increasingly measured in clicks and retweets, new publications are being born that have done a lot to solve the canon problem \u2014 even if they\u2019ve yet to fully come to terms with the larger problem of economics disguised as user empowerment. Indeed, Nieman Lab did a thoughtful series on them back in September . They are the so-called new little magazines: The New Inquiry , n+1 , The Baffler , Jacobin , Blunderbuss , and Cato Unbound . These magazines have increasingly moved beyond the campus culture wars, synthesizing the best of the classic liberal arts canon with a deliriously diverse range of literary, philosophical, and historic sources, all for the purpose of shining light on present-day political and intellectual problems. \u201cLiberal arts journalism\u201d is not dead, or even dying. It might actually be more robust than ever. 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. C.W. Anderson is an associate professor of media culture at the City University of New York.",
    "title": "Beyond journalism in the present tense"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-news-bundle\/",
    "story": "The bundle is dead; long live the bundle. But this isn\u2019t the familiar 20th-century package of paper and ink. It\u2019s a bundle that lives as code, often assembled by other bits of code, and almost invariably run by people who write code, not words. The bundle used to be that daily paper delivered to the doorstep. The newspaper evolved as a collection of the important and the worthy alongside the amusing and entertaining, mixed in with display ads and classifieds. As a physical delivery system, it\u2019s a historical artifact of the technology, audience, and business of a particular time. The Internet brought about the great unbundling of the printed product. As news moved online, readers could pick and chose stories of interest, ignoring the rest. Worse for media outlets, digital also disconnected news from its traditional life-support systems \u2014 real estate, autos, and classifieds, to name just a few. But the newspaper bundle was more than a business model or a product of the technology and delivery systems of the time. It brought order to countless things happening daily, with people relying on professionals to select a handful of events and include them in the stable and fixed format of the printed page. By packaging the world, the newspaper (and later the newscast) brought a sense of harmony to the cacophony of the everyday. The bundle is back, enjoying a renaissance as people realize that they need it more than ever before. The promise of the seemingly infinite Internet, where news from everywhere in the world is just a click away, has run into the reality of life, when time and attention are finite. The idea of the bundle isn\u2019t broken \u2014 it never really went away. Rather, the packaging of the news is morphing into multiple forms as the established ways of stuffing the news into the one-size-fits-all newspaper didn\u2019t work so well in a networked society. Instead, there are examples of media organizations rethinking what this bundle looks like when people access the news throughout the day on multiple devices and in varied environments. Consider NYT Now from The New York Times or the Circa news app. These bear some resemblance to collections of news of the past, assembled by professionals with expertise in journalism. But the bundle is also remerging in new forms that have little in common with the newspaper and are the product of technology, rather than journalists. The news is being packaged in four broad ways: by apps, devices, social signals, and algorithms. As more and more people get their news on mobile devices, apps are one of the entries into news, with the stories curated or aggregated by people or algorithms. Many of these apps are from companies who are not in the news business, such as Twitter, Instagram, or WhatsApp. But news is part of the mix of the important, amusing, and mundane on these services \u2014 news is incidental to the main reason for using these services and apps. They provide news organizations with new ways to distribute their material and reach audiences, but with little control. Moreover, the 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. 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. It turns out there is a need for someone or something to select, filter, sort, and package the news into some sort of bundle. Given a choice, people tend to opt for convenience. The newspaper was a convenient way of getting the news. The new ways of bundling the news make it easy to stay informed, or at least, appear to be informed. Increasingly, these will become the main way people experience the news. 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\u2019s 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\u2019s audience for a particular news organization\u2019s work will be there tomorrow. Alfred Hermida is the author of Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters and an associate professor at the University of British Columbia.",
    "title": "The fall and rise of the news bundle"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/a-thaw-in-the-newsroom-glacier\/",
    "story": "Here is hoping 2015 will see: \u2014 The Pulitzer Prizes are not given to the same annual one-day wonders. \u2014 Stories on Jill Abramson morph into stories from Jill Abramson. \u2014 More math \u2014 any math \u2014 in all those gushy profiles of new media startups and journalism\u2019s saviors. \u2014 A Journalist Rescue Fund , one that is as impactful as the Scholar Rescue Fund . \u2014 That likely new owners of the Financial Times and The Economist value the journalism there as much as the trophy brands they are buying. \u2014 That more newsrooms (and Wall Street) will shun third-party \u201cpartner\u201d parasites. \u2014 An acknowledgement that 20\/20 is good as hindsight goes, but if 2020 is your target for major change, you are in deep trouble. \u2014 The good people of Circa\u2019s newsroom have a soft, good landing somewhere. \u2014 A meaningful thaw in the glacial pace at which most mainstream newsrooms still get their journalism to their audiences. \u2014 More Ken Doctor analysis and less mainstream media punditry. \u2014 The realization that if you are now behind your readers\u2019 habits (think social and mobile, for example),  your news organization is not playing catchup but is actually going backward. Raju Narisetti is senior vice president for strategy at News Corp.",
    "title": "A thaw in the newsroom glacier"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/authenticity-expertise-and-intimacy\/",
    "story": "Pay attention to the bylines of the most popular stories of the year. My prediction is that few will be staff reports and most will be gripping, memorable opinion pieces. You may be cynical and blame shrinking newsroom budgets, as this writer did in The Washington Post , decrying the rise of the first-person essay. Or you can embrace the trend as the equalizer and gesture of inclusion that readers actually wanted all along. Indeed, the popularity of such pieces points to the authenticity, expertise, and intimacy the Internet craves. Of you. By you. In 2015, newsrooms can meet this demand by growing their op-ed sections to include real voices from inside their communities, rather than using it as a dumping ground for people who put their time in and got 750 words a week as reward. This hunger to hear, feel, experience voice is changing the news side, too. In digital, we ask writers for their \u201ctake,\u201d whereas the papers of record tend to slap a bolded or italicized or boxed \u201cnews analysis\u201d as a warning. In 2015, I predict we\u2019ll get a lot more comfortable with our passions, obsessions, biases, confusion, hypotheses, addictions, sordid pasts, tense futures. Newsrooms would do right to publish staffers\u2019 more human and personal offerings, instead of sending their best work off to Medium or Facebook . We should strive to produce the stuff readers remember, not just share. In my yearend column for Poynter, I based my own Top 10 list of 2014 journalism on the stories that stayed with me beyond the retweet. Interestingly, none of the pieces were simple \u201ctakes\u201d; all relied on rich details, shoe-leather reporting, and grounded expertise. As we strive for journalism that is memorable and authentic, metrics will finally be on the side of diversity. For years, many of us have been saying that media\u2019s survival rests on an inclusive newsroom that can get inside stories. Of you. By you. I\u2019m hoping 2015 is the year we can finally shut up and let the traffic do the talking \u2014 and hence guide the hiring. S. Mitra Kalita is the executive editor at large for Quartz.",
    "title": "Authenticity, expertise, and intimacy"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/this-is-the-new-that\/",
    "story": "The lock screen is the new homepage . The homepage is the new barstool for your regulars . Regulars are the new audience developers . Audience Developer is the new Senior Editor . Senior Editor is the new vanity title . Vanity titles are the new email newsletter . Email newsletters are the new tweetstorms . Tweetstorms are the new inverted pyramid . The inverted pyramid is the new buggy whip . [Intermission.] Quickie podcasts are the new Serial . Serial-style in-house entrepreneurship is the new seed round . Seed investment is the new original content . Original content for the lock screen is the new lock screen . Dan Shanoff is director of digital development at USA Today Sports.",
    "title": "This is the new that"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-rise-of-the-jacktivist\/",
    "story": "I moved from Washington, D.C., to Silicon Valley roughly a year and a half ago. Since then, I often tell people that the main difference between the two is that they run on different currencies: Washington runs on power, the Valley runs on ideas. Meetings here start with a simple prompt, one as innocent as \u201cI just want to pick your brain.\u201d Prior to moving here, no one had wanted to pick my brain without a very specific reason. But people in the Valley crave access to ideas \u2014 any and all of them. So here are a few ideas and, yes, hopes boldly issued as predictions for journalism in the coming year. These are all picked from various conversations I\u2019ve had in and around Stanford. They\u2019re also in line with my overarching prediction: that journalism will return to its roots of service to and empathy with the community. 1. The \u201cuser-generated content\u201d label will disappear It is not possible to simultaneously claim a community is a valued participant in the news-gathering and synthesis process and to bury their work underneath the story in comments sections or segregated in silos. Comments are already beginning to rise from the basement of the news well. But the practice of featuring readers\u2019, viewers\u2019 and listeners\u2019 content alongside that of full-time journalists will soon become the norm rather than the exception. This means the number of dimensions on a news story will continue to grow, fed by traditional and non-traditional sources alike. Medium and The New York Times are already elevating comments to accompany the main body of a story. Meanwhile, the Knight Foundation-funded New York Times\/Washington Post\/Mozilla collaboration signals, I hope, the death-rattle of the \u201cuser-generated content\u201d label. 2. The face of the newsroom will (finally) change The tech sector and journalism have something in common: a diversity problem. We now have a date, 2045, for when white people are predicted to become a minority in the United States. The number of minorities in newsrooms, still remarkably low, will need to rise even faster than the population\u2019s rate of change if news organizations want to remain relevant. Coverage of the events in Ferguson and now protests across the country have yet again highlighted the need for more diverse perspectives in the nation\u2019s newsrooms. Change is happening, but not fast enough \u2014 this includes racial, cultural, gender, and socioeconomic diversity. The Washington Post narrowly missed having an all-male masthead this November. In the same month, The New York Times\u2019 public editor Margaret Sullivan highlighted the paper\u2019s coverage of the \u00fcber-wealthy, and the complaints among some readers that it was out of touch with the vast majority of Americans. She concluded that the news organization\u2019s coverage of expensive foods and real estate had \u201cnothing to do with the Times\u2019s highest purpose.\u201d If that\u2019s not a call for disruption, I don\u2019t know what is. 3. Data-driven becomes people-driven New data repositories are springing up everywhere, and the phrase \u201cdata-driven journalism\u201d is nearly as ubiquitous. Some data is incredibly valuable, and the way data sets are presented is critical. But the most successful stories are driven by people, not data. What people need and want to know is what makes stories useful. No matter how sophisticated a tool or story may be, it will languish online if it fails to fulfill a real need. Data may be the source, but people are the drivers. \u201cPeople-driven\u201d journalism brings me to my last prediction: 4. From apart to a part: The rise of the \u201cjacktivist\u201d Journalism has always relied on empathy, the ability of one person to see the world from the perspective of another and to bring it to a distant audience. But declining budgets have made it more difficult for journalists to be with the people they cover, and that means that empathy between journalists and subjects is weakening. I predict that a new kind of professional will fill this gap \u2014 a hybrid of journalist and activist, or \u201cjacktivist.\u201d It may sound cringeworthy to veteran journalists, but I hope they\u2019ll bear with me. From solutions journalism to The Last Graph (a project being run by my friend Ben Connors and for which I serve as an advisor), the path between the story and someone\u2019s ability to act on it is getting shorter. This means news outlets will have to do more than merely report what\u2019s going on. Journalists will have the added responsibility of giving people a pathway to act, to improve their lives and the lives of others. Again, I understand this may seem anathema to some, but people today need more than headlines and stories. They need more than data, visuals, and explanations. They need more than journalism. They need an empathy-driven service to improve their lives, their communities, and our world. Emi Kolawole is the editor-in-residence at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, better known as the Stanford d.school .",
    "title": "The rise of the jacktivist"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/more-is-less-or-too-much\/",
    "story": "For me, giving your audience less is the key in 2015. One of the biggest insights I took away from the Times\u2019 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. While we are all immensely proud of the majesty and breadth of the New York Times report, for many of our readers, it\u2019s simply overwhelming. Indeed, we are all overwhelmed \u2014 by our social feeds, by our overflowing read-it-later accounts, by the bulging digital stack of New Yorkers tucked behind the Newsstand icon. Attention span is the new Page 1. How do we transmit that essential packet of judgment that is Page 1, along with an optimized taste of the breadth of what the Times offers, to our fans? How do you choose what to serve, and to whom, and when? And how deeply should technology guide us in making those decisions? As the editorial lead of an entrepreneurial team trying to figure out how to increase the audience of The New York Times outside of the United States, discovering what people want and when they want it is what I will be spending my time doing next year. I can\u2019t translate every single word of The New York Times into every language. But that\u2019s actually a really good thing, because 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 \u2014 even if they don\u2019t know it. Lydia Polgreen is deputy international editor of The New York Times.",
    "title": "More is less (or too much)"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/visualization-goes-mainstream\/",
    "story": "Alberto Cairo teaches infographics and data visualization at the School of Communication of the University of Miami.",
    "title": "Visualization goes mainstream"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/a-return-to-subscriptions\/",
    "story": "2015 will see a tipping point in favor of subscription-based journalism online. The Gamergate debacle demonstrated conclusively that the public\u2019s access to information is vulnerable to those least equipped to guard that door \u2014 publicists and brand managers. Whoever imagines that Gawker \u2014 which recently lost substantial ad revenues in the wake of a literally incomprehensible attack launched by a pack of moronic Internet trolls \u2014 is uniquely at risk is mistaken. Every online media property that relies on ad dollars for its survival is in equal danger. (Tangentially related: Design schemes that interfere with an online publication\u2019s readability, such as infinite scrolling, popups, quizzes, \u201csponcon,\u201d and interstitials, will also be kicked to the curb. For example, Gawker\u2019s homegrown CMS, the unpardonable Kinja, was meant to optimize reader engagement. But the result of permitting Kinja to dictate reader experience is\u2026words fail, but okay, it\u2019s like throwing a perfectly beautiful magazine into a Vitamix, whizzing it to shreds and then asking the reader to glue the bits back together.) Harper\u2019s,\u00a0The\u00a0New Yorker, the Financial Times,\u00a0and The\u00a0New York Times are proving that readers will pay for online access to worthwhile content. Publishers have come to learn, sometimes the hard way, that Facebook and Google wield an unseemly, even dangerous amount of power over their audiences. A publication can be brought to collapse with the tweak of an algorithm, as Metafilter learned last May, owing to such a tweak at Google \u2014 whereupon they instituted a subscription\/donation model that appears to be working fine.\u00a0Facebook now consists of a stream of advertisements interspersed with your friends\u2019 wedding and baby photos. Why should this organization have any effect whatsoever on news, politics, or any other serious area of our culture? It should not. There is Upworthy, there is The Huffington Post, there are penny-ante aggregators of every description, flush with venture cash. Apparently Pinterest drives a substantial amount of traffic to news sites now. Considerations of search engine, advertising, and social media optimization are bound to have an increasingly detrimental effect on what the public can read. As a reader, I am very eager to pay for better managed, better edited, better looking publications. I do not care to rely on Pinterest, or Facebook, or even Google to learn what I need to know. So it is a great relief to see signs that readers, editors, and publishers are taking back the reins. Maria Bustillos is a critic and writer in Los Angeles.",
    "title": "A return to subscriptions"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-readers-we-cant-friend\/",
    "story": "When a story does well on Facebook or Twitter, it\u2019s become natural in a newsroom to fist-pump: Yeah! Thousands of shares, hundreds of comments! It feels like a victory to us, because journalists are the most social-media savvy profession out there (other than whatever you call the cottage industry that works for Kim Kardashian). We use Twitter as a news feed, Facebook to judge virality. But while these platforms are indispensable to us as newsgatherers and as distributors, they also have their limits. Facebook, Twitter, and several other social media platforms form an echo chamber for the media savvy: the ones who are news addicted, tuned in, apped up. The trouble with those readers is telling them something they don\u2019t know, what they haven\u2019t seen on their plethora of news feeds and breaking news alerts and text messages. But there\u2019s another kind of reader who doesn\u2019t make a peep \u2014 who doesn\u2019t friend us or follow us or read bylines. This reader may own a smartphone and use email, but doesn\u2019t care much for apps. He hasn\u2019t enabled alerts. She watches cable news but finds Facebook tiresome and Twitter exhausting, and only goes to Google when there\u2019s an enormous news event like the Malaysian plane or the Boston bombings. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are three major sources of traffic that are opt-in for readers. But what about the readers who haven\u2019t opted in to the constant news cycle? How do we serve them? How do we even reach them? They\u2019re on the web, but not where we can see them. That\u2019s why whenever we see a story that has 100,000 or 300,000 views or more, we should wonder: Where are the readers we\u2019re not seeing? That kind of traffic \u2014 a hit by any means \u2014 is actually only a fraction of the people who could be reading a story, especially in this age of widespread, easy distribution. In Internet terminology, they talk about the \u201cdeep web\u201d of content that search engines never show. We face a similar \u201cdark web\u201d of readers we never see: Who are they? How do they consume news? How do we reach them if they\u2019re interested in news but not interested in Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? There\u2019s a vast segment of America that wants to consume news, but isn\u2019t as savvy and app-happy as journalists. These are the readers that, years ago, would have had newspaper subscriptions. They don\u2019t spend their day clicking all over the Internet: They\u2019ll read news online (or maybe they won\u2019t), but they fall back on a few established brands and don\u2019t know about the variety of choices out there for news consumption. These are the readers we don\u2019t see in our referrer pages, as a whole. Savvy digital journalists have, with good reason, chased those Facebook and Twitter trending boxes and Pinterest and Google traffic for years. But that traffic is becoming more unreliable to journalists in particular. Facebook is changing its algorithm in ways that hurt many news organizations, Twitter has come under criticism for its often hostile tone, and Google can kick off entire newspapers if it feels it has reason. We have become supplicants to other platforms in order to get our readers. That\u2019s already a problem, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s the approach taken by my newspaper as well as others like The Atlantic, and I think it\u2019s a good start.) Do we compete harder against rivals, or find some way to join forces? There\u2019s no obvious answer at the moment \u2014 and given the diversity of views in journalism and about journalism, there may never be. But 2015 is the year \u2014 or should be the year \u2014 that we think about these issues in earnest. For those who need to survive, this is the key. For those who need to thrive, the next step to growth is reaching beyond the readers who are sitting ducks on social platforms. They want the news too. Heidi Moore is U.S. finance and economics editor at The Guardian.",
    "title": "The readers we can\u2019t friend"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/news-in-a-remix-focused-culture\/",
    "story": "We aren\u2019t ready for Vine. Hell, we weren\u2019t ready for Tumblr. We still don\u2019t know what to do with Instagram. For all our talk of disruption, most people in media are still more familiar with Snow Fall than the Schmoney Dance . 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.) In 2015, smart media will explode the way they think about delivering news and put everything on the table. What does news look like now, and what can it be? What are our assumptions about visual culture\/end users\/lifecycles of content\/measuring impact that stop us from moving forward? What stories are we creating that are so compelling they can be watched on a loop? How do we wed stories and experiences to place, space, and time? 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? The tools have arrived. It\u2019s time for us to build. Latoya Peterson is deputy editor of Fusion\u2019s Digital Voices and the editor\/owner of Racialicious .",
    "title": "News in a remix-focused culture"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/newsroom-diversity-dont-talk-about-it-be-about-it\/",
    "story": "Almost every night of the week of November 23, I stayed up late, my eyes puffy from sleep deprivation, my fingers darting up and down my iPhone, and my ears half-tuned to fuzzy livestreams on my laptop. It was announced on November 24 that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, would not be indicted. I was off work that week, but getting updates on my feed and from the Breaking News app , of which I\u2019m an editor. But each night, it seemed like coverage of Ferguson from news organizations that didn\u2019t fully grasp the story \u2014 the fact that there was more to it than riots; the fact that the community of Ferguson had deeper issues with police long before Michael Brown\u2019s killing \u2014 went through the same vicious cycle that ended in a conflation of key narratives. I guess I could pivot here to talk about the future of news in 2015 being about mobile and personalization. (I would geek out about both immensely.) I suppose I could opine on how the reinvention of the article structure to better accommodate complex stories like Ferguson will be on every smart media manager\u2019s mind, just as it should have been in 2014, 2013, and 2003. But let\u2019s have a different kind of real talk, shall we? My prediction for the future of news in 2015 is less of a prediction and more of a call of necessity. Next year, if organizations don\u2019t start taking diversity of race, gender, background, and thought in newsrooms seriously, our industry once again will further alienate entire populations of people that aren\u2019t white. And this time, the damage will be worse than ever. The consistent top-line narrative of the week of the Michael Brown grand jury decision sounded a lot like \u201cblack people got angrier and burned things last night.\u201d But the nuance that reporters like Joel Anderson at BuzzFeed, Wesley Lowery at The Washington Post, and Yamiche Alcindor at USA Today strived for in their tweets and pieces continued to be lost in the conversation spurred by organizations primarily focused on the visual gravitas of burning buildings and tear gas. (A shameless plug, but at Breaking News we made a conscientious effort to intersperse Editor\u2019s Notes within our feed to offer context. We can always improve.) Nonetheless, looters and rioters were grouped in with peaceful protesters, and Ferguson became reality television, with bad guys fighting bad guys. With all the effort from reporters and some newsrooms to broaden the scope of Ferguson coverage, I had to wonder: Who\u2019s making the decisions to tell just a sliver of the story? Are journalists with a different perspective in positions to challenge these decisions at the edit table? These questions quickly started sounding rhetorical in my mind, and they shouldn\u2019t be. To amend the damage from years of systemically shutting out women, people of color, and people who identify as LGBT from newsrooms will take bold decisions, deliberate recruiting steps, and dedication. Not a hire here or there, but bold, real, actualized regime change. 2015 will be the year in which organizations that truly care about this will see their coverage thrive, while others will continue to chip away at their own credibility by tuning out the communities that drive news cycles around stories not rooted in the straight white male perspective. The good news is that some of our most prominent newsrooms have followed up on the declaration of diversity as a priority and are teaching others what that looks like. BuzzFeed, for instance, is supporting a fellowship for journalists of color to deep-dive into investigative pieces, among other impressive efforts. As Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic aptly noted this month : \u201cNo publication has more aggressively dealt with diversity than BuzzFeed.\u201d The excuse that it\u2019s \u201ctoo hard\u201d to find good journalists of diverse backgrounds is complete crap. Tap into the resources from organizations like NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA, and NLGJA. Get editors to start creating pipelines for talent through workshops and programs geared to underrepresented groups. Ask your boss, your coworkers and yourself: Is my organization starting somewhere? Am I doing enough? And one last question\u2026really think about this one, now: Am I doing anything ? Aaron Edwards is an editor at Breaking News , a part of NBC News Digital.",
    "title": "Diversity: Don\u2019t talk about it, be about it"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-year-we-finally-hear-how-we-sound\/",
    "story": "\u201cContent\u201d fills spaces. \u201cContent\u201d takes the shape of its container. \u201cContent\u201d groups things that have little to do with one another; \u201ccontent\u201d conflates things that are fundamentally opposed to each other. \u201cContent\u201d is the kind of word you use to tell convenient lies. \u201cContent\u201d sounds most at home next to \u201cmarketing,\u201d which is another way of saying that \u201ccontent\u201d is pejorative. Nobody actually loves \u201ccontent\u201d except people who understand it as a means to a boring end. So: As a dozen adjacent industries inevitably grow and shrink and merge and disappear into one, I predict that maybe \u2014 hopefully? \u2014 we will arrive at a shared realization: We never should have given in to that terrible word. This will be followed immediately by another realization, which will not help: That it probably wouldn\u2019t have changed a thing. John Herrman is coeditor of The Awl.",
    "title": "The year we finally hear how we sound"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/ads-that-keep-up-with-editorial\/",
    "story": "In the coming rush to measure ad engagement by visibility , I hope we\u2019ll see a grand reconsideration of how ad units are created to engage readers and complement content, rather than to simply capture attention. Ad design platforms will come to resemble the story-building tools we\u2019re presently building for ourselves. We need to indulge the idea that the quality of ad design should pace that of our content design. Presuming both sides resist gaming visibility \u2014 publishers by disinclining themselves from cramming too many ads into a single viewport\u2019s worth of content, advertisers by not engineering creative to exploit unbillable ad loads \u2014 I think publishers of all sizes will be able to see advertising as a frontier for innovation instead of a source of contention. Matt Dennewitz is vice president of product for Pitchfork.",
    "title": "Ads that keep up with editorial"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/race-isnt-a-specialized-beat\/",
    "story": "Voting rights. Policing. Domestic violence. Immigration. LeBron. Solange. What do all of these things have in common? They were all among the top stories of 2014, and they all involved race. African Americans aren\u2019t the only ones reading these stories, and, increasingly black journalists aren\u2019t the only ones covering as them. Which brings me to my prediction: If 2014 was the year we all talked about race, 2015 should be the year we all get serious about actually covering it. What stories like these and others have shown is that 50 years after the Civil Rights Act officially ended racial discrimination in our country, we are still living in two Americas that are having very different and separate conversations about where we are as a society. Back then, the media played a role in bringing both sides to the table, to increase understanding as a catalyst for the change our nation needed. Today\u2019s media must pick up that mantle. While organizations like NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA, and NAJA remain dedicated to increasing diversity in mainstream newsrooms, our efforts are only part of the work that must be done to ensure these a commitment to more accurately reflect the communities they cover. We should all be asking: Is an eye to diverse coverage a priority in my newsroom? Am I part of the problem? Attention to diversity in the newsroom is one thing, but fearlessness about tackling diverse topics is another. And while diversity hiring is important, it isn\u2019t happening nearly fast enough. And since newsrooms won\u2019t be a melting pot any time soon, we must also ask how we can do better with the newsrooms we have now. When we begin to think of race as something we should all care about, no longer will the black reporter be the first to raise her hand to go to Ferguson. Black editors will not be the only ones suggesting major projects involving race. Other magazines will be as bold as The Atlantic in exploring complex topics like reparations with fresh eyes. If black journalists have been pigeonholed by race coverage, white journalists must also be challenged to join the race beat. Not because it\u2019s courageous, but because race is an American story and we are all Americans. The sooner this happens, the less we see these stories as \u201cspecialized coverage\u201d and the more they become simply good journalism. Getting serious will mean getting out of our comfort zones to find these untold stories, often hidden in plain sight. Most of the issues highlighted in 2014 \u2014 from Michael Brown to Michael Sam \u2014 were not anomalies. A start: Make a New Year\u2019s resolution to find sources who don\u2019t look like you. To talk to your newsroom counterparts of different backgrounds. Start thinking of tackling the issue of race as your fight, too. Errin Whack is vice president of print for the National Association of Black Journalists.",
    "title": "Race is your beat, too"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/security-and-subtlety\/",
    "story": "The web is no longer a place for news organizations to dump text and expect their audience to care. News websites should be designed clearly and give folks what they want as quickly as possible; stories should be well written and reported, as well as use creative ways to explore the covered topic whenever possible. Luckily, newsrooms are up to the challenge. This year saw website redesigns for three major news organizations and the launch of new ones. But 2015 wont just be about gorgeous websites and nifty graphics. In 2015, newsrooms will need to focus on creating secure products with engaging content that blends text, data, and graphics seamlessly. Web security becomes a priority It\u2019s 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. The New York Times\u2019 code and development blog recently sounded the alarm for more newsrooms to enable HTTPS, while Mozilla, the EFF and others started Let\u2019s Encrypt \u2014 a certificate authority that aims to make setting up HTTPS as easy as possible by summer 2015. Currently, HTTPS is still a tough feature to implement, but it\u2019s far from not impossible. The Marshall Project , The California Sunday Magazine , The Intercept , and the Center for Investigative Reporting (my employer) already have. Interactive features move beyond big projects As more newsrooms experiment with presentation and data-driven interactive features, there\u2019s a trend to move them into entirely foreign designs or entirely different domains ( apps.newsorg.com vs. www.newsorg.com ). While much of this is to avoid the technical contraints of newsrooms\u2019 content management systems or to experiment with new technologies, it often doesn\u2019t mesh into the workflows of web producers or the copy desk. On top of that, there\u2019s often a lot of effort required to build large, blowout projects with data and graphics that could have easily nestled themselves within a typical story framework. For 2015, look for small interactive features that enhance stories. ProPublica recently wrote a story on how U.S. telecom providers add tracking numbers to their users\u2019 web activity. They included a small tool that allowed users to see if they were being tracked. It was small, engaging, and made a great story even better. var pymParent=new pym.Parent(\"nieman_widget\",\"\/\/s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com\/www-acwx-net\/nieman\/index.html\",{}),iframe=document.querySelector(\"#nieman_widget iframe\");iframe.setAttribute(\"allowtransparency\",\"true\"); The web is not nigh, but here Newsrooms are getting better at building web products and it shows. There was plethora of great work from small and big news organizations alike this year. We\u2019re only getting better at this and 2015 will show just how good we are at truly building digital-native newsrooms. Aaron Williams is a news applications developer for the Center for Investigative Reporting.",
    "title": "Security and subtlety"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/los-angeles-is-the-content-future\/",
    "story": "From where I stand, 2015 is going to be a big year. Sure, I can tell you about wearables reaching a new level of maturity. Likely not Google Glass in its current form, but the next wave of devices that include not only the Oculus (developed by a former journalism major ) but also Samsung and others that convert smartphones into full immersion, mobile devices. Mainstream wearables will likely stay on your wrist, at least while out in public. But their user interfaces (hands free, constant listening, always collecting data, etc.) will be baked into all our current and future devices. Or I can tell you about the type of content that is going to be produced on and for these new devices, including virtual reality and augmented reality. Two words: Magic Leap . This mystery company has gotten attention from Google and others in the form of millions of investment dollars . Cinematic VR \u2014 created through high-end cameras or strung-together GoPros \u2014 is going to be a new, completely different form of video storytelling. Point-and-shoot 3D modeling is coming fast too, eventually making Unity 3D the latest edition to a newsroom\u2019s growing toolkit. I can also tell you about the social media platforms that will continue to pop up with a mobile-first focus. While most are likely to disappear just as quickly, there will be a handful that stick around and grow. They\u2019ll likely be centered around anonymous broadcasting, unknown masses easily creating more bite-size, disposal content. (For example, keep an eye on Yik Yak . Users have already begun to break news there faster than Twitter. If you\u2019re near a college campus, check out how wildly adopted it already is\u2026but also prepare yourself for the raw realness that gets posted.) Do yourself a favor and read this Medium piece from Kik\u2019s CEO , who lays out the mobile future, all happening outside of Silicon Valley. Maybe I can tell you about how diverse communities \u2014 gender, people of color, and age \u2014 will shift into content creator\/driver\/leadership roles because they feel empowered (or frustrated) enough to stop waiting for traditional outlets to reflect them. In fact, finally, this year organizations will realize the future is with those groups. (Okay, that one is more of a hope.) But the truth is, my prediction is all these things finally coming together. (Note: I didn\u2019t say \u201cconvergence.\u201d) For me, 2015 is the year technology empowers content \u2014 whether creation or consumption. It\u2019s not the year of technology \u2014 it\u2019s 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. Yes, we\u2019ll continue to develop and get new technologies, but 2015 is the year when content creators will learn that shovelware is a dead end and gimmicky content for pageviews is pointless. They will mature by embracing the true nature of these platforms. It\u2019s not the technology, it\u2019s the content. This is something I see here in the City of Angels. All those \u201cbig things\u201d I listed above are happening \u2014 and likely centered \u2014 in Los Angeles. This town is the content capital of the world. You know it for films and TV, as well as video games. But did you know it is also the place for viral web videos? YouTube, Vine, Instagram, etc. \u201cstars\u201d appear to be coming from here. Creative content people are frustrated with the industry and creating their content on their own terms. Sound familiar? You\u2019ve heard podcasts are big right now? This town has been doing it for years and it doesn\u2019t sound like radio. Kevin Smith , Marc Maron , Chris Hardwick , Felicia Day and countless others have been creating podcasts for and of the web for years and years, gathering a following of millions. (Check out Kevin Smith talking about the creation and development process for his most recent film Tusk in this Nerdist interview .) While Yik Yak is in Atlanta and Kik Messenger is in Waterloo, Ontario, Los Angeles is home to Snapchat, Tinder, and Whisper\u2026truly mobile apps that have influenced the tech industries. It\u2019s also home to Oculus (VR leaders) and Qualcomm (AR leaders). The game has changed. As well as who is playing and creating the game. Let\u2019s hope journalism is ready it. Robert Hernandez is an assistant professor of professional practice at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.",
    "title": "Los Angeles is the content future"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-allure-of-a-finishable-digital-news-experience\/",
    "story": "1. Social storytelling News organizations have been Storifying and embedding tweets for the past three or four years, and 2015 will see further experimentation around adding social elements to stories. Some news sites may style social elements to fit with the design of their article pages, but an increasing number of outlets will try SAM , which launched a social storytelling feature at this year\u2019s Online News Association conference. SAM, which started as a social asset management tool for newsrooms, has four templates. Here is an example of a gallery of tweets and here\u2019s an example of the map template showing the location of tweets. SAM is a powerful tool, allowing journalists to work collaboratively. It\u2019s is a paid service , so it\u2019s unlikely to become as widely used as Storify, but it\u2019s promising in that it has a sustainable business model from the start. SAM recently made a top hire in recruiting AP\u2019s user-generated content editor Fergus Bell . (And yes, we\u2019re planning to experiment and use SAM embeds in Wall Street Journal articles.) 2. Finishable apps With big national and global news outlets publishing hundreds of articles a day, the web offerings of news organizations are far from finishable. I was interested to read author and entrepreneur Nir Eyal\u2019s ideas on how to build habit-forming products. He discusses how people feel a sense of reward by completing a task, which encourages them to return again. Here\u2019s a post I wrote on Medium on why social engagement, explainers, and finishable products are all key for getting news audiences hooked. Yahoo News Digest , which launched at the start of this year, is one example of a finishable reading experience; The Economist\u2019s recently launched Espresso, a daily app that takes about five minutes to read, is another. I predict there will be further launches of complete reading experiences in 2015. 3. Uber-inspired easy payment methods It was at the end of a Christmas party that I realized how Uber has revolutionized payment from mobile phones. Guests started booking Uber taxis, with several people new to Uber and signing up for the first time. 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. 4. The realization that Facebook drives more traffic than we thought There\u2019s been much discussion of late around the fact that some mystery \u201cdark social\u201d traffic to news sites is actually from Facebook. And Facebook has announced that it\u2019s fixed a \u201cbug\u201d making it easier to track referral data. I suspect that many news sites will get a surprise early in 2015 and realize that they get far more traffic from Facebook than they previously thought. That\u2019s surely good for social media editors as we see a rise in social traffic. 5. Serializing podcasts The success of Serial podcast will no doubt result in enthusiasm to present more stories in audio form. But James Ball from The Guardian makes a good point: Getting a bit worried everywhere is going to try to do Serial, like we all did after Snowfall. That would be *horrible*.\u2014 James Ball (@jamesrbuk) December 1, 2014 6. A social watermarking tool While there are good watermarking tools (I like Watermark.ws and Canva ), I am hoping a super-simple option will be created in 2015, perhaps by Twitter. Adding credits to photos bypasses the need to write a credit in a tweet , and with people downloading and re-uploading photos, a watermark means the credit travels with the image. 7. Further experiments in atomized news There have been challengers to the inverted pyramid of a news story this decade. First there was liveblogging; more recently Circa created \u201catomized\u201d news . Atoms can be quotes, stats, or facts, and journalists can create a story from the building blocks of previous articles, recycling the atoms. Next year will bring further forays into atomized storytelling, with CMSes developed to manage the constituent blocks. 8. Even more social video Social videos that explain stories in animations in less than three minutes will continue to prove popular with audiences. ( Here\u2019s an example in #theshortanswer series , created by The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Jason Bellini.) 9. More jobs in social newsgathering Eyewitness reporting or UGC has really gathered pace this year, with reports from Kobani, Raqqa, and other areas dependent on eyewitnesses on the ground for information and images. This year also saw a sea change in how we work at The Wall Street Journal, with Storyful journalists now embedded in three of our newsrooms. News organizations will grow in confidence in using images from social media in favor of agency pictures, understanding the audience sees beyond quality and appreciates the immediacy of a social image. There will be an increasing number of roles created in social newsgathering with core skills being search and verification. 10. More iTunes-for-news experiments This year saw The New York Times invest in Blendle , an \u201ciTunes for news\u201d 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. Sarah Marshall is social media editor for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at The Wall Street Journal.",
    "title": "The allure of a finishable news experience"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/more-gonzo-less-paywall\/",
    "story": "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. Newer generations of readers are not accustomed to paying for the news \u2014 a trend introduced not by social media or the Internet, but by television and the 24-hour news cycle. Before people shared news items on Facebook, they shared newspapers and magazines. Whatever people are willing to pay to get the news is very little, and well below the mark that many newspapers set for their paywalls. Yet people do splurge on other things, including devices like tablets that deliver the news, among other things. People will pay for gonzo. I draw inspiration from the style of journalism pioneered by Hunter S. Thompson, but I\u2019m not suggesting that journalists should imitate him \u2014 or that people are willing to pay for that form of journalism. Thompson\u2019s work was specific to an era and right for that era. Transplanting that ethos to our own era would be desperate, and being out of tune with your own era is a tragedy. I\u2019m more interested in the idea of gonzo as a metaphor \u2014 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 \u2014 but possibly the one to tell the most interesting and thoughtful story. But the gonzo mentality also provides a way for reconciling the temporal and other incompatibilities introduced by online platforms for news storytelling that make it difficult for journalists to be the first and only ones broadcasting a story. The gonzo approach emphasizes getting to accuracy through personal experience, emotion, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and many of the other traits that characterize collaborative news storytelling on a platform like Twitter. It\u2019s a mistake to characterize gonzo as emotional and thus erratic: On the contrary, the approach is about emotion applied carefully \u2014 curated emotion, emotion and reason working together, objectivity and subjectivity as parallel processes and not polar opposites. In the past few years, a few news outlets have taken such steps, with many missteps in the process but also with a lot of merit and promise. So here\u2019s to more of that! Zizi Papacharissi is a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Chicago.",
    "title": "More gonzo, less paywall"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/fewer-and-fewer-shut-off-valves\/",
    "story": "Coming up with original ideas to write is hard. It\u2019s expensive too. Human beings cost money to employ. Having them come up with original work and writing it all out racks up a bill. For instance, I am a grossly overpaid public university professor, so paying me to write predictions for 2015 is going to cost a pile of cash. And given my whiff last year , it may not produce much value. So a good deal of attention this past year went to bot written stories as a way to create value while dropping costs. We can debate all day about if this is a good idea, but given the state of media right now, we can safely predict one of two things will happen next year: Bots will continue to write more and more stories, feeding into the gigantic swirling maw of the Internet, hoping to snag just a moment of your attention in the hopes you\u2019ll see an ad that pays more than the story cost while you\u2019re there. We\u2019ll finally figure out how to make original content pay on the web and the feed-the-beast, hot-takes-for-clicks economy will collapse in a not-to-be-missed heap. So, to save Nieman Lab a lot of (fictional) money, and to prove a point, I am not going to write (more) predictions for next year. It\u2019s too hard and too expensive. So I\u2019m going to let my computer do it. To do this, I took all of last year\u2019s predictions \u2014 all 38,053 words of them \u2014 and fed them to a Highly Technological Natural Machine Language Learning Algorithm Bot (nerds: a simple Markov chain generator). Using that corpus and that algorithm, I generated 200 Original Statements About the Future. Then, using a Highly Advanced Editorial Workflow System I call editing, I cut those 200 statements down to a set of predictions that I will now claim as my own. They are: As producers, we will not bring final resolution to the severe crisis that is affecting what the media consider newsworthy. Ambient interfaces will begin to think about how concepts like audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and propensity modeling can be as citizens and policymakers. We will pass from the connections. It makes sense to fact-check a twerking video. Thankfully there\u2019s no thundersnow. We\u2019ll probably see some more super-rich people jumping into the product. An API will change if television is disrupted on a given point in time \u2014 and that will have an impact at a bar. Big audiences still want to receive alerts that are spun off. TV and radio evolve to be all about data. We will start to be suspicious of business plans or pitches that don\u2019t start with an intensive three-day introduction into design thinking. More Instagrams. For newspapers, get the hang of convincing strangers to tell stories using drones for their own dedicated drone units, with specialists who know what they\u2019re doing or where they\u2019re doing it, to take advantage of the wearable devices. With the addition of HBO GO, require consumers to create projects that are useful to them in a restaurant without seeing people on their morning commute. Computational social scientists are already working on wearable technology, however, they are tackling interesting problems, and I personally look forward to reading the email lists where she asks her question about how to be able to quickly iterate and push ideas to market, all while empowering culture changes along the way for customers who advertise with media companies with giant databases of information that makes up articles. Fewer and fewer shut-off valves. Using a phone\u2019s gyroscope and accelerometer, we can have or facilitate real conversations. It raises the bar, getting increasingly good at what you are. The very best will linger in your feed (especially if you want to listen to us on the wane, but still, the people who come to Gawker Media as the way you may have let local media still has the power expressed in the stories that are hiding in plain sight). We\u2019re going to see in front of a hexacopter suddenly crashing into the comments, saying there was talk of the 24-hour news cycle and expect readers to roam away from preventing people from sharing it freely, as they also want the audience clicks most often. We probably aren\u2019t ready to master this new uncertainty. There you go. Completely original predictions, generated in a few seconds, edited down in a matter of minutes, and they could hardly do worse than my prediction last year. It\u2019s a trend. Bank on it.",
    "title": "Fewer and fewer shut-off valves"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/consumer-aware-context-aware\/",
    "story": "Every December, my company produces a report highlighting the tech trends that we think will make the biggest impact in the year to come. The report is built using a tool I developed called the FuturePrint, and calculates the near-future research we do along with patent filings, academic papers, shifts in consumer behavior, changes in government policy, new investments and acquisitions, microeconomic trends, and the like. This year, we published 55 trends (our largest to date) \u2014 but from my point of view, only one matters most for those in the news business: Consumers \u2014 not their devices \u2014 must be the focus of any content strategy in 2015. When I\u2019ve suggested this to newsroom managers and executives before, I hear the same response: That\u2019s what we\u2019re already doing. Don\u2019t you notice how our app fits both your Galaxy Tab and your iPhone? Can\u2019t you see that we made the mobile version shorter than the web version? Responsive design doesn\u2019t address the consumer\u2019s needs. It solves the needs of the device. A device over which news organizations have zero control. In 2015, news content, the brand experience, the interactivity, the social components, and the advertising all must answer this central question: What is the ideal version of this story for this individual consumer, given what she\u2019s doing, what she\u2019s thinking, what she\u2019s been reading or watching recently and how much time she has at this very moment? It\u2019s critical news organizations reframe their thinking now, as the device ecosystem grows more disparate and the volume of content continues to explode. Consumers will start to lose their appetite for the listicles, explainers, and quizzes that delivered so much traffic this year. The next opportunity for news organizations to gain market share isn\u2019t through a new storytelling template, but rather in a new form of hyper-personalization. Think about the last story you wrote or helped create. How was it read? Under what circumstances? Where and when do you think it was read? Did it impede or complement what the consumer was doing at the moment she started to read? (Seriously. Take a few minutes and think about it.) Was there really just one ideal digital version of your story? Of course not: There were likely many versions, each of which depended on a bunch of variables related to the consumer. Is the consumer at home? At a new location? At work? Is she commuting? At the gym? Does she most likely want to read a long, in-depth story right now, or would she be happier just getting a few bullet points? Does she already know a lot about this story, or the key players and facts be new to her? Would she be happier with a video or a text-only version? Is this a story that her friends are probably talking about? Once you start asking those questions, you\u2019ll realize that there are multiple scenarios and, as a result, many possible versions. There is the \u201crunning on the treadmill at the gym\u201d version. The \u201cmorning jog around my neighborhood\u201d version. The \u201cwaiting on line at the coffee shop\u201d version. The \u201cstuck on a plane for the next two hours\u201d version. The \u201csitting at work, trying to get smarter fast\u201d version. The \u201cI want others to know about this story so I\u2019m sharing it on Facebook\u201d version. Those are activities. What about satisfying a consumer\u2019s motivations? Like many people, I want to be delighted, inspired, and engaged. But I consume news content for different purposes depending on the story and situation. Just because I\u2019ve read one article about the Sony hack doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that I want more stories about Sony as a company or about hacking in general. Maybe I was reading it because a friend I trust suggested it to me. Or maybe I\u2019m fascinated by what one of the leaked emails said. Or maybe it\u2019s something else. If you want to captivate me and to keep me reading, any related content shown must factor in my personal preferences, influences from external sources (like social networks) and future desires. It is possible to offer consumer-centric versions news content by creating and distributing compelling stories using technology we already have. On the consumer side, accelerometers and gyroscopes are in our mobile devices right now. Learning my home and work locations is already a part of the app ecosystem. Predictive modeling is being used outside the industry to help surface our intents as well as our granular likes and dislikes. On the distribution side, algorithmic curation can enable a platform to syndicate different versions of the same story without a lot of extra human capital. This means that at a bare minimum, news organizations have the ability to know if consumers are jogging, or riding in a car or commuting on a train. If a consumer is moving for more than one minute at 12 mph, why send her a push notification to read a news story? Why not offer her an audio version instead? If, after monitoring her behavior (as so many non-news apps already do in the background), you know that most days at 6 p.m. she\u2019s driving home from work, why not send her a very short podcast version of the day\u2019s news from your anchor or editor-in-chief? If her calendar shows some upcoming travel, why not queue up a list of text-only stories, along with some of your most-read long reads to help her feel smarter faster while she\u2019s airborne? Some companies have working products that anticipate our needs and provide the right content at the right moment. Google Now is the best example. However, in the coming year, I\u2019ll be watching emerging projects and research from Expect Labs, Cognitive Scale, Microsoft Cortana, Facebook, Amazon, Stanford, and IBM. Smart news organizations know that in 2015, the value of our attention will continue to eclipse the value of our clicks. The best way to harness attention in the digital ecosystem is to service the consumer\u2019s needs rather than simply repackaging content to fit the form factor of her various devices. A deeply engaged consumer is easier to monetize. She is a good ambassador for the news organization. And, ostensibly, she\u2019s a better informed citizen. Amy Webb is CEO of Webbmedia Group, a digital strategy consulting firm, and a recent Visiting Nieman Fellow.",
    "title": "Consumer-aware, context-aware"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/a-wave-of-p-r-data\/",
    "story": "Nobody can say exactly when the trend first started, but in 2014 we saw the first major outbreaks of bogus data distributed by private companies just so it would go viral online. Among the many exciting thing we\u2019ve learned this year are: Democrats watch more pornography than Republicans , according to Pornhub. Mexicans and Nigerians are the best at sex , as polled by condom manufacturer Durex. The nation\u2019s most stressed zipcodes include one near you , as reported by real estate blog Movoto. Washington residents complain about rats more than New Yorkers , as reported by Orkin. People sometimes use car-share services after hooking up , thanks to some creepy oversharing from Uber. To be blunt, all of these stories were unredeemably awful , riddled with errors and faulty assumptions. But accuracy wasn\u2019t the point. All of these examples of \u201cdata journalism\u201d were generated by companies looking for coverage from online news organizations. The goal is a viral feedback loop, where the story is reaggregated by others, the site surges in its organic search rankings, and the study is tweeted for days even by haters like myself. For these purposes, they were perfectly designed to exploit the nature of modern news distribution online. The old adage of \u201cfast, cheap, good \u2014\u00a0pick two\u201d often used about software development also applies to news, where good is not just a function of your current work but your established reputation. So many news organizations on the web start at a disadvantage, with their only option to put as many fast and cheap stories out there to hit their monthly traffic targets. And everybody knows that posts that feature several key charts or 40 maps that explain something tend to do pretty well in traffic. But it takes time to gather the data yourself \u2014 so it\u2019s much better if someone provides it to you. Which is how we got here. It\u2019s not unusual for news organizations to source data from private companies much like they would from government agencies or scientific agencies. For instance, The New York Times sources data from a company that tracks executive compensation to report on trends in CEO pay every year . But the PR-driven data stories I listed above come from an opposite direction to traditional data journalism. This is not data that is collected and analyzed in response to specific questions and whose quality is checked before publication, but prebuilt charts pushed to news organizations like press releases and targeted against specific topics like sex, anxiety, and shame that are more likely to elicit clicks. If you\u2019re a company looking for press, why not use those fancy data scientists you hired to also generate some free publicity outside the company? And if you\u2019re a reporter at a news startup who needs to constantly fill the news hole with new material, why wouldn\u2019t you run one of these? Everybody\u2019s happy, even if the data isn\u2019t right. And in 2015, it will only get worse \u2014 because I\u2019d bet the big PR firms have noticed the success of some of these smaller efforts and will try their hands at this new form of marketing. Don\u2019t be surprised when Kraft creates a map of which states consume the most macaroni and cheese, or Starbucks releases charts showing how pumpkin spice-related products lift the American economy each fall. The wave of bullshit data is rising, and now it\u2019s our turn to figure out how not to get swept away. Maybe Snopes sells life rafts? Jacob Harris is a senior software architect at The New York Times.",
    "title": "A wave of P.R. data"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/what-might-vs-what-should\/",
    "story": "Here are three things that aren\u2019t necessarily going to happen in 2015, but should happen so journalism can have a great new year. This isn\u2019t a set of predictions; it\u2019s a wish list. We\u2019ll stop using the word \u201ctechnology\u201d to marginalize things that don\u2019t fit our definition of journalism. Journalists use the word \u201ctechnology\u201d to dismiss something as a mysterious other far too often. An alien to our orthodoxy. At some point, the printing press, radio, and television were all \u201ctechnology\u201d too. Now they\u2019re Journalism 101. Yesterday\u2019s \u201ctechnology\u201d is an integral part of today\u2019s daily routine. Stop using it as a dirty word, and start looking for places where it can become another instrument in your arsenal. Technology? You\u2019re soaking in it. So enough of that noise. We\u2019ll stop shaming newsrooms when they\u2019re smart about trying new things. When newsrooms move swiftly to pull the plug on experiments that aren\u2019t meeting their parameters for success, we shouldn\u2019t immediately line up around the block to wag our see-I-told-you-so fingers in their faces. Thoughtful experiments are necessary. And you can recognize the thoughtful ones \u2014 they\u2019re backed by orgs that are transparent about achievable goals, not the ones flinging spaghetti at the wall. We\u2019ll accept the parts of UX and product design that can really help us, and pay attention to what our customers actually need (and maybe even want). We\u2019re a service industry, one with a heavy dose of The Greater Good mixed in. We can\u2019t use the latter as an excuse to ignore the former. Talk with your customers. Do the not-so-hard work of finding out what they actually want from you. I guarantee it can complement the journalism you\u2019re already doing quite nicely. David Sleight is design director of ProPublica.",
    "title": "What might vs. what should"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/learning-from-mobile-first-markets\/",
    "story": "My book celebrates African innovation, and doing more with less. It\u2019s in that spirit that I offer two related predictions for news in 2015: First: A push to target global audiences. Second: Product lessons from \u201cmobile-first\u201d markets. My first prediction doubles as advice for publishers. Growth is an obsession for all new media companies, and in its simplest form, growth means \u201cnew.\u201d Leave aside your millennial acquisition strategies, product tie-ins, and paid marketing campaigns \u2014 the newest digital news consumers are in emerging markets. Global expansion as business strategy is gaining traction: Quartz and The Huffington Post both launched India properties in 2014; Politico is headed to Europe. BuzzFeed is hiring reporters in Nairobi, Lagos, and San Paulo. The New York Times has deputized editors to focus on international audience development and, after 125 years, The Wall Street Journal is committing resources to African bureaus. The wire services have long maintained outposts around the globe, but investment in foreign reporting for foreign audiences is the next step for western media. I predict that 2015 will see additional expansion into the largest emerging markets where English is spoken \u2014 India, Nigeria, South Africa \u2014 and eventually, those where it\u2019s not: Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia. For years, North American media salivated over China\u2019s huge population denominator, despite the controlled information economy. It\u2019s smoother sailing in these other countries, with millions of eyeballs, significant print traditions, and an accelerating digital culture. Add to the mix the access-to-knowledge investments from large technology companies like Facebook and Google and you have a massive expansion of the addressable market. Transposing content and strategy to new markets requires nuance. As a onetime foreign reporter in Kenya, I know the pitfalls of the lone correspondent model. It\u2019s not clear whether global expansion should target western audiences (with famously low tolerance for \u201cpassport stories\u201d) or local ones \u2014 nor whether western entrants should aim to complement the existing news ecosystem or serve as outright substitutes. Advertising markets also vary in sophistication and saturation. But global expansion leverages the simultaneity that defines modern media. And strong reporting from truly independent media could transform societies where the accuracy (much less freedom) of the press is in doubt. What\u2019s assured about the entry into these new markets is that the next billion news consumers will be mobile. With an array of devices on which to consume news, ranging from tablets to televisions, wealthy OECD countries have been \u201cpulled\u201d into mobile. Emerging media markets, by contrast, are born mobile first. Four billion people are still offline \u2014 but I\u2019ve seen firsthand how data and hardware are becoming cheaper and more abundant. Telecoms and handset manufacturers are planning for a smartphone revolution \u2014 it\u2019s only sensible for the media industry to do the same. As a result of both trends, I predict the character of news presentation is going to converge \u2014 on developing, not developed market terms. We\u2019ve seen carrier-independent chat and mobile payments explode on mobile in emerging markets and then make their way to the wealthy world. For news publishers, the product and content lessons learned from serving emerging markets could prove invaluable in the quest to build a mobile experience that does more with less. Dayo Olopade is author of The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa and a Knight Law and Media Scholar at Yale.",
    "title": "Learning from mobile-first markets"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-year-news-notifications-need-to-grow-up\/",
    "story": "We were driving from Pittsburgh back to Manhattan in a rental car when something remarkable happened: We hit traffic because of an accident. The remarkable thing was not hitting traffic on the turnpike. The remarkable thing was that Waze , miraculous app that it is, knew it was an accident, and how far ahead it was (not very) and when it first occurred. And it told me within seconds of my hitting the brake. Thirty years ago, an accident that shut down the turnpike counted as news. There\u2019s a spectacular video that I frequently come back to, showing the way in which traffic was reported in 1980 in New York City. Watch this, and marvel. My phone does this better and faster. Fine: We\u2019re used to this by now; those who drive more frequently are probably completely blase about Waze, too. But it\u2019s not just that Waze gathered information and had it available, it\u2019s that it shared it, when needed, without my doing a thing. Waze does this for traffic. Dark Sky does it for weather. ESPN\u2019s app does it for my sports teams. A personalized newspaper delivered to me in an instant. At The Atlantic this month , Alexis Madrigal points out that notifications like the ones from these apps have made the notifying device the nexus of information (so to speak) \u2014 not the notifying service . \u201cAll messages come to the same place \u2014 the phone\u2019s notifications screen,\u201d he writes, \u201cso what matters is what your friends are doing, not which apps they\u2019re using.\u201d Phones and tablets just ring with information when information arrives; we don\u2019t even need to open the app to get the message. (This is in part what Twitter tried to be, an agnostic notifications tool. Then it crippled its development platform.) Which brings us back to 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. It\u2019s a message traveling on the notifications social network that isn\u2019t specific to the person \u2014 a risky proposition. News outlets often haven\u2019t figured out how to keep the boss informed , in the evocative formulation of NYU\u2019s Jay Rosen. 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\u2019t breaking, above-the-fold stories. Or they\u2019ll cede that real estate to apps that can deliver specific, detailed information that we might once have called news. The Times\u2019 Nick Bilton used an analogy in 2010 that has stuck with me. Once we bought paper maps to figure out where we were; now, our phones position the map around us. Bilton argued that information at large would be similarly re-centered, using the example of Facebook. What the news media needs to be now is Waze and Dark Sky \u2014 immediate and useful. Waze and Dark Sky, after all, are already part of the news media. Philip Bump writes about politics for The Washington Post.",
    "title": "The year news notifications need to grow up"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/immersion-in-virtual-reality\/",
    "story": "As someone who puts \u201cdissecting future-of-news discourses\u201d high in her research interests, coming up with my own prediction for 2015 is an awkward exercise. I leave the real attempt at futurology to the crew of talented media gurus that write in these columns, but there\u2019s still something that I would like to see more in 2015: immersive journalism that builds on the possibilities of virtual reality. Virtual reality journalism \u2014 is that even a thing? Well, there\u2019s a Tow Center research project aimed at prototyping \u201clive motion virtual reality journalism.\u201d Journalist Nonny de la Pe\u00f1a has produced several immersive reportages. And the topic gained some attention here and there . Not that it would save journalism (even if you\u2019ll always find people ready to make that kind of argument ). But it would be plain fun . Having seen how people (myself included) react around an Oculus Rift, there\u2019s definitely a sense of enchantment and playfulness that goes with a maturing technology previously confined to ugly, unconvincing depictions of badly animated reality. The interesting questions don\u2019t solely reside in the wonderment of geekery, of course. They\u2019re also in a peculiar conceptual connection. Who else used to invoke the phrase \u201cimmersion journalism\u201d? The tenets of literary journalism, new journalism, creative nonfiction \u2014 whatever you want to call it \u2014 were built on a long tradition that brought together George Orwell and gonzo frenzy. To them, the concept refers to the need for journalists to immerse themselves in a first-person experience in order to be able to account for the world. The fact that there is a conceptual connection between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and geeks with VR headsets \u2014 between, on one hand, extreme forms of subjectivity conveyed in literary storytelling and, on the other, attempts to represent the world as realistically as possible with the help of the latest technologies \u2014 is exactly the kind of strange parallel I find intellectually exciting. Because ultimately, these ways of doing journalism question our relation to reality \u2014 how journalism is about the world and how different ways of accounting for\/mediating\/constructing (choose one according to your own level of constructivism) the world constitute the diversity of journalism. The question is an old one, the epistemology of journalism: How can reality be known? Through the drug-hazed account of Dr. Gonzo , or with a good old factual, inverted-pyramid report? So far, virtual reality focuses on the eye-witnessing role of journalists and attempts to replicate it faithfully in the experience of the user \u2014 with a realist epistemology that seem to imply that seeing with our own eyes (and maybe interacting?) is what matters most. I\u2019m really curious to see what you\u2019ll make of that, 2015. Juliette De Maeyer is an assistant professor at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al.",
    "title": "Immersion in (virtual) reality"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-rise-of-digital-india\/",
    "story": "It will have the world\u2019s highest smartphone user growth rate and will overtake the U.S. in the number of total smartphone users. Newspaper circulation will continue to grow, at the same time that digital news operations will see exponential increases in user numbers. It will have the highest number of English-speaking graduates in the world, many with digital and IT skills. Its government will begin the roll out of a massive investment program which aims to bring the Internet to everyone in the country, representing one-fifth of all humanity. Its prime minister will have the biggest social media following of any global leader. This is not some fantasy media and tech-savvy nation we might one day wish to exist \u2014 it\u2019s India in 2015 (or very soon afterwards). India\u2019s media industry has already changed significantly in 2014, giving enough clues to its rise as a global digital media player in the coming year. International news brands have been paying serious attention to the country\u2019s rapacious appetite for news for some time, but this year saw a marked step up. The BBC News website launched an India-focused page in 2011 and has since continued its investment in the country with new programming, local language and digital news content . It was no fluke that when the BBC picked India as the first country to launch an innovative news service on WhatsApp during the country\u2019s general election : India has the highest number of WhatsApp users in the world (70 million as of November). Other international players have increased their presence too. Quartz launched an India edition in June, tying up with local partner scroll.in . This fall, The Huffington Post announced it was launching in India, partnering with the Times of India. BuzzFeed too now has an Indian edition , although it finds itself competing against a slew of BuzzFeed-style local clones that are already proving to be successful, if you judge them by the number of jobs they are advertising for. On Facebook, Indian users broke through the 100 million mark, making the country second only to the U.S. in terms of total users. So what\u2019s going to happen in 2015? Mobile One major factor will be the rise of the cheap smartphone. The average price for a smartphone sold in the country is likely to be \u00a380\/$100, with entry-level devices starting as cheap as \u00a330\/$45. Local players such as Micromax and Karbonn are making a huge impact in this price bracket, as well as competing in the higher-range specs being sold by Samsung and Chinese competitors. Close to 100 million Indians may well buy their first smartphone next year, with many of these also connecting to the Internet for the first time as a result too. Mobile networks are due for a major upgrade, with 3G coverage increasing significantly and more 4G license holders launching by the middle of the year. This has major implications \u2014 and opportunities \u2014 for all news organizations wanting to develop a digital mobile strategy in the country. Broadband India\u2019s creaking telecom infrastructure has long held it back, not helped by crippling bureaucracy and corruption. But as part of the \u201cDigital India\u201d program outlined by the new government, there is hope that an ambitious plan to connect all 250,000 villages across rural India through a high speed fiberoptic network will see results. CEOs of major Silicon Valley players, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM, have all met with the Indian prime minister when he was on a recent visit to the U.S. and are all now working on related projects with the Indian government. Many news organizations in the West have already seen significant online traffic to their websites and social media channels from Indian users. Few have really yet taken advantage of this and built a coherent strategy to maximize it. For those that do, the future rewards will likely be big. Media regulation In August, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) published a report with recommendations on media ownership . While its recommendations have had mixed reviews, it aimed to address the cancerous problems spreading across much of Indian media \u2014 politicians owning many of the country\u2019s news channels, the lack of governance over advertorials, and the endemic problem of \u201cpaid media,\u201d where media outlets were being paid for giving favorable coverage to political parties and companies. All these factors have left an Indian population highly suspicious and cynical of many of its news providers. Next year could see the beginnings of a turnaround in this attitude as regulations begin to take hold. The TRAI report also proposed releasing the national broadcaster Doordarshan from its state-owned shackles and giving it autonomy along similar lines as the BBC in the U.K. Doordarshan has long been seen as a sleeping giant, and as it transitions into its new form, it may also move onto the international stage, giving an Indian perspective on world news. Will the likes of CNN, BBC News, and even CCTV and Russia Today get new competition soon? Finally, I have heard countless radio executives in India and the West over the years bemoaning the rather baffling restriction that private Indian FM stations face of not being able to broadcast news. Many Indian governments in the past have suggested they would look again at this, but have failed to act. The new Indian government has made similar overtures, but while it has ruled out any immediate change in regulations, the positive sounds coming out of New Delhi are louder than they\u2019ve been for quite some time. It wouldn\u2019t be a surprise if at some point in 2015, there was a relaxation of this restriction \u2014 which could lead to a radio news revolution unlike anything we have seen before. It has many problems still to overcome, but if you want a tip for the biggest media story of 2015, I\u2019d suggest it\u2019s not going to be a new tech startup or the latest billionaire takeover of a media institution \u2014 it\u2019s something altogether bigger. It\u2019s India. Trushar Barot is apps editor for BBC World Service\/Global News.",
    "title": "The rise of digital India"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/encouraging-engagement-accepting-anonymity\/",
    "story": "In comments sections of news articles and blog posts, it\u2019s not uncommon to see someone quip \u201cI went straight to the comments.\u201d Many newsreaders actively seek not just to read articles when they come to a website, but also to engage on hot-button issues in politics, entertainment, or sports. Engagement is a primary appeal of consuming news online. Vibrant comment sections are a key way of growing and maintaining a news website\u2019s readership. Over the past few years, some news websites, notably ESPN, have moved to to using Facebook for comments. Due to Facebook\u2019s real name policy , using Facebook for comments in this way links commenting on news articles to the rest of the commenters\u2019 lives. This is the most common way for a website to impose a real name policy in its comments section. 2015 will see a return to discussion formats that permit individuals to create and maintain a profile separate from their primary social and professional profile. In a world where cyberharrassment is pervasive, requiring use of one\u2019s real name forces individuals to accept any consequences and shaming that would come from offensive speech in real life. But this norm-imposed limitation of offensive speech comes at a substantial cost. Requiring the use of real names also stifles speech that is not offensive. A person might not want her coworkers or family members to know that she enjoys cosplay or has libertarian political views \u2014 not because those aspects of her life are shameful or because she would speak about those interests in offensive ways, but because, for whatever reason, she would prefer that not be part of her public image. Such a person would not engage in forums that have real name policies. In this way, news sources with real name comment polices limit readership. Accepting a degree of anonymity is a prerequisite for allowing individuals to engage with the news online. Engagement is a key part of the news consumption experience. Anonymity enables more engagement. More engagement leads to more clicks and thus, more revenue for content providers. 2015 will see these forces come to a head, and begin a move towards fewer real name policies in website comment sections. Lauren Henry is a Knight Law and Media Scholar at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.",
    "title": "Encouraging engagement, accepting anonymity"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/smart-filters-on-the-rise\/",
    "story": "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. 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\u2019 increasing desire for control in reaching their audience, and yes, continued rebellion against the stream. Turning information into understanding will go beyond just connecting the dots. This is about trusted filters identifying the \u201cright\u201d new information, surfacing significance, and making relevant connections to existing knowledge based on the specific audience. If information is made up of facts and stories, then understanding is the connection between those facts and stories \u2014 it\u2019s identifying your audience and knowing how information relates to their world and their life. What was once the \u201cfilter bubble\u201d gave way to smart and sophisticated filters that we trust to navigate the web on our busy and distracted behalf. Newsletters, explainers, and niche networks all do this: They filter the infinite web through a lens we choose and trust. The best journalism has always created knowledge and surfaced significance through powerful storytelling and depth of reporting. The change here is the scale of information with which audiences are faced, making context and understanding more important than ever. The old challenge was often phrased as getting it first or getting it right, but in the knowledge-first era journalists face a new mandate \u2014 getting it to make sense. The key is that people aren\u2019t just looking for information \u2014 they\u2019re looking to understand. And understanding comes from seeing the significance and relevance of information and news. The difference between seeking information and seeking knowledge is that the latter helps someone live her life and empowers her to make informed decisions \u2014 to not just know, but to understand. \u201cEveryone is dealing with this huge firehose of information and content,\u201d NYT Now editor Cliff Levy told Jihii Jolly in the Columbia Journalism Review . \u201cIt\u2019s really important for people to find someone they can rely on who can tell them, \u2018These are the things you should pay attention to.'\u201d 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. I spent the last year obsessively following news about the news and the business of journalism \u2014 reading, sifting, making sense of what was going on in media, and then putting all of that together in the American Press Institute\u2019s Need to Know newsletter . The most important lesson I learned is that identifying your audience and their needs is critical. There\u2019s an increasing demand for products that act as a trusted filter, but also contextualizes from a point of view. Millie Tran is a writer at the American Press Institute.",
    "title": "Smart filters on the rise"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/platforming-the-news\/",
    "story": "News organizations are increasingly designing and creating tools, products, and even entire platforms. Who wouldn\u2019t want a technological boost in competitive advantage and efficiency, or an extra, diversified stream of revenue? We see the inklings of this platform-centric thinking in the industry\u2019s new darlings: from Quartz\u2019 Chartbuilder tool that eases the creation of data graphics, to Mashable\u2019s Velocity dashboard which tracks and predicts viral content online, to Vox Media\u2019s Quiz Quartet which allows non-developers to conveniently create a news quiz. Many of these projects are open source, allowing others to contribute or build on top of the published code. Together with computational thinking, the open source ethos is helping to\u00a0fuel this shift to the platform mindset. Platforms are about creating a solid starting point that can be a springboard for extension and further innovation. They factor out some of the messy details and make it easy for innovators to add a creative twist and build on top. While a story is a one-off, a platform for stories can produce a hundred or even a thousand different experiences. Story platforms for quizzes, charts, timelines, maps, and the production of other content are just a starting point, though. In 2015, we\u2019ll see an expansion of platform thinking beyond content , to include the whole range of journalistic activities, from news gathering to sensemaking and dissemination. For instance, The New York Times recently launched and open-sourced its Hive crowdsourcing platform , which empowers people to setup and run their own crowdsourcing projects. The Coral Project will rethink online comments as a platform with core functions and a plugin architecture for adaptation. What other journalistic tasks and outputs are ripe for platformatization? On the other hand, it\u2019s crowded out there. Because they\u2019re so valuable, platforms are a highly competitive endeavor. And as these platforms leave their nests and hit the market, news organizations will begin to spar with incumbent information providers \u2014 Google, SocialFlow, Disqus, Flipboard, and others \u2014 particularly where the platform enables an activity outside of content production. Should news organizations compete on the same terms as these other incumbents? In her address to the Reuters Institute last month , Emily Bell noted that none of the social dissemination platforms that we use on a daily basis have been created by news organizations. In the same vein would be automated news writing platforms like Automated Insights and Narrative Science, which systematize the production of news copy from structured data. Do we really want to be so reliant on social platforms for driving traffic, or to be leaning on only one or two algorithms for producing automated content at scale \u2014 or is diversity still important ? There\u2019s more at stake in the competition around platforms than market share and money. It\u2019s a question of values. Platforms produced by news organizations can weave journalistic values into their fabric. The increased production of platforms by news organizations will, whether consciously and intentionally or not, spread their ethos and provide a counterweight to the prevailing set of Silicon Valley objectives typically baked in. Nick Diakopoulos is an assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.",
    "title": "Platforming the news"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/buzzfeed-will-hire-a-public-editor\/",
    "story": "Margaret Sullivan is a national treasure. That\u2019s because The New York Times is a national treasure, and Sullivan is its public editor : the best to fill that role in its history. (I almost added the caveat \u201cadmittedly short,\u201d but no: The Times has had a public editor for over 10 years! Daniel Okrent , the first \u2014 and second-best \u2014 inaugurated the office in 2003.) Sullivan\u2019s writing and reporting \u2014 and it is reporting, truly, the thorniest kind \u2014 is both (a) entertaining on the level of prose and ideas, and (b) important on the level of policy and (seriously) democracy. She has proven beyond a doubt that a public editor can be more than a cop or a scold. At her best \u2014 and again, to underscore: Sullivan is the B-E-S-T \u2014 a public editor is like one of those mid-air refueling planes, sustaining an organization\u2019s highest hopes for itself. Not every news organization has a public editor, of course. In the case of legacy organizations \u2014 your newspapers, your cable channels \u2014 I suspect it\u2019s hard to justify a whole FTE (and a senior FTE with real intellectual and organizational horsepower, at that) when the content she produces won\u2019t be widely read. In the case of new media companies \u2014 your BuzzFeeds, your Vices \u2014 I suspect the role seems contrary to the move-fast spirit of the Internet. Additionally, I think in both cases there\u2019s this fairly realistic reservation: Sure, sure, the Times is a national treasure, but nobody cares about the inner workings of our organization. Well, I think that, at this moment in history, we are all pretty interested in the inner workings of BuzzFeed. It certainly positions itself as a company we ought to be interested in. I\u2019m not talking about its latest valuation or the size of its audience; I\u2019m talking about how it fits into our culture. \u201cBuzzFeed is the social news and entertainment company,\u201d the company tells us. The social news and entertainment company. There\u2019s a Times-ian ambition there: The Times is, after all, the newspaper. I\u2019m bullish on BuzzFeed. I like their loose, anarchic spirit; I like their inventive story formats; I love their recent hires. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s snarky or scolding to say that BuzzFeed as a whole is more often than not\u2026complicated. I mean, of course it is! Atop a bubbling viral cauldron, they are building a super legit news organization. That is complicated . And so, in 2015, in recognition of that complexity, and as a sign of maturity and confidence, BuzzFeed will hire a public editor. None of its peers \u2014 Gawker, Vox, Vice \u2014 would ever dare to do it, which of course will make it even more attractive. BuzzFeed alone will see the role properly, as an opportunity: to give readers a glimpse into its guts, and the palpable energy there; to answer forcefully its snarkiest critics (and yes: if and when those critics are right, admit it, and take action; that\u2019s part of the bargain); to have fun; and most importantly, to make its reporters, editors, and producers better at what they do, and prouder of what they do. BuzzFeed\u2019s first-ever public editor will be smart. She will be hilarious. She will deploy gifs as nimbly as anybody else on staff. But beware, feckless meme slingers: She will take no bullshit and suffer no fools. She won\u2019t be a hater \u2014 never that \u2014 but she will have an unwavering compass, and she will make BuzzFeed a better, stronger, more serious place. Maybe every other Thursday, she and Margaret Sullivan will get drinks. Maybe it will be awesome. Robin Sloan is the author of Mr. Penumbra\u2019s 24\u2011Hour Bookstore .",
    "title": "BuzzFeed will hire a public editor"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-rise-of-the-personal-public-beef\/",
    "story": "It\u2019s no secret: There\u2019s a common and widespread problem in media \u2014 the profusion of white, mostly male, voices. But take a quick survey of the web in 2014 and a very clear interest in conversations around race, gender, and sexuality and in feminist perspectives becomes evident. This year, websites like Vox, The New York Times, Vogue, and BuzzFeed joined the discussion with journalistic bombast: intellectualizing terms like \u201cbasic,\u201d reporting on the unrest in Ferguson , covering our (apparently new, but not really new) obsession with big butts , and weighing in on powerful woman showrunners in Hollywood . At times, reading about these and other topics felt incredibly voyeuristic. Most lacked cultural ownership. That\u2019s not to say \u201cblack topics\u201d or \u201cLatino topics\u201d or \u201cwomen topics\u201d don\u2019t deserve interrogation from outside voices, but there\u2019s real substantive value when said stories are filtered through, say, the gaze of a black reporter or a Latina writer who is grounded in the story. I was taught that journalism should never be personal \u2014 that a reporter should always be objective. But that\u2019s a lie. The best stories are personal. This is why the public dispute between The Atlantic\u2019s Ta-Nehisi Coates and New York\u2019s Jonathan Chait was the most exciting and surprising thing to happen to the internet in 2014. It was also a sign of things to come. But let\u2019s back up. The Great Public Intellectual Deathmatch of 2014 began when Coates wrote \u201cThe Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males,\u201d a moving and clear-eyed dispatch about Paul Ryan\u2019s remarks on personal responsibility among men in America\u2019s \u201curban\u201d centers. Chait responded in kind , writing: \u201c[U]ltimately, Coates is circling back to an argument that prevailed among liberals in the 1970s and 1980s, and which Democrats abandoned, correctly.\u201d Then Coates responded to Chait\u2019s response. Then Chait responded again. And so on for the better part of March. At one point in the discussion, Coates fires : \u201cIt\u2019s good to debate a writer of such clarity \u2014 even when that clarity has failed him.\u201d The debate quickly became personal. Coates was writing from experience. Chait, who\u2019d done his research, was mostly speaking as an outsider. The spirited back-and-forth recalled the mid-1990s beef between the Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac \u2014 but for a new generation of nerds. (I\u2019ll let you decide who Coates and Chait are in that analogy.) The debate \u2014 all held online, for anyone to see \u2014 remains one of the best exchanges surrounding American racism, black pathology, and personal responsibility in the last decade. But the Coates\u2013Chait battle royal also points to a trend that, I think, will present itself with increasing frequency next year: personal-public beef. Personal, and typically IRL, disagreements will find new life online in 2015. Writers will call bullshit on other writers, pointing fingers, responding with substance and heart. Traditional media companies will no longer subtly hint at terrible content published on competing websites \u2014 instead taking the writer and website to task. There\u2019s a surplus of clutter on the Internet these days: poorly reported articles, thinkpieces lacking thought, and crappy, unimaginative lists. So in a way, personal-public beefs will help cleanse the web of noise. Don\u2019t get me wrong; I\u2019m not campaigning for overly hostile journalism or opinion-writing, but instead a healthy and diligent exchange of ideas. Take a stance. Make your case. Just be ready to hold your ground. Jason Parham is a senior editor at Gawker.",
    "title": "The rise of the personal-public beef"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/siphoning-from-social-tech\/",
    "story": "2014 led me to into newsrooms around the world to have discussions on challenges, opportunities, and collaborations. My perspective is from social tech\u200a \u2014 Embedly works with social networks, music sites, media aggregators, chat apps, and blogs. I watch closely the relationship between social media and news sites, focusing on not the sharing aspect, but what features spread between the sectors. I see what news organizations are doing, what\u2019s working, and share what I find with others in the field. Patterns emerge. They are not entirely surprising, but they point to important shifts in news that will be furthered in 2015. The front page curated feed works, you\u2019ll see more of it The New York Times released Watching in September , a curated feed of news from around the web. It\u2019s like a Twitter timeline or Facebook feed, but on the NYTimes.com homepage. There\u2019s a heavy human touch rather than an algorithmic one. Regardless of how the feed is constructed, its UX is inspired by social media feeds. The idea has already caught on\u200a\u2014 \u200aI\u2019ve met with other news orgs working on releasing similar feeds for their homepages. Because of its ability to make the homepage more living and engaging, this will become a widespread feature. Leaving it out will be an opportunity missed. More interfaces to video you can\u2019t help but watch There are two trends with video that I expect will grow. Over the past year, Facebook started autoplaying videos, and it was the most magnetic UX update since little red notification numbers. A video might be skipped, but once it starts, our eyes are just drawn to keep watching. It\u2019s devious. More videos showed up in the News Feed, and producers were incentivized to upload videos to get the boost the autoplay affords. This is a significant shift for Facebook \u2014 not only is it a place to share videos, it\u2019s a host for videos. The spread was galvanized with the viral ice bucket challenge, which played on the dynamics of Facebook tagging. Now, news sources are embedding Facebook videos into their articles. Expect Facebook to make more moves to legitimize themselves as a news source, as well as become the new Internet TV. Beyond Facebook, we may even see muted autoplay become more common because of how powerful it is to get attention. The second trend is the spread of Vines and Instagram videos on other sites. Sports, celebrity gossip, and humor are among the most popular topics covered; these videos are short, so people watch them all the way through. Because of this engagement, newsrooms want to tap into that value and integrate third-party Instagram videos and Vines. I see this come up both in discussions with news organizations and in the referral domains for Vine and Instagram embeds. In 2015, expect to see more Instagram videos and Vines across news sites. Better comment interfaces will increase the lifespan of articles A European media company I met with mentioned a main area of concern being comments. The company stressed that if comments are actually successful, they will keep people on a page long after reading the article; social aggregators like Reddit and Hacker News are an extreme illustration of this. Sometimes the content is skipped all together in favor of the discussion. News sites see these discussions, and are enamored by that level of engagement. Knight, Mozilla, The Washington Post, and The New York Times revealed a comments engine initiative, the Coral Project , which further emphasizes the importance of figuring out online discussions on article sites. With this powerful collaboration, expect to see new features come out to advance comments within articles. Attention minutes will become the standard In February, Upworthy came out with a post advocating for attention minutes over pageviews . This was huge\u200a \u2014 \u200athey went public on out how to find great videos and compel people to share them. While clickbait-y titles are important, people won\u2019t share media if they aren\u2019t inspired by it. By focusing on what people pay attention to, rather than just what they click on, Upworthy found what moved people. There was a panel on analytics and readership at ONA14 that focused on pageviews, but didn\u2019t mention attention minutes. During the Q&A the lack of attention minutes was raised , and The Guardian revealed it is something they are working on and excited about. Over 2015, measures of attention minutes alongside pageviews will become the standard across media sites, and will surface more content you can\u2019t help but share. Kawandeep Virdee is an engineer and developer advocate at Embedly.",
    "title": "Siphoning from social tech"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/more-listening-more-collaborating\/",
    "story": "The conversation around the disruption of the news is surrounded by fear. We pick apart the successes and failures of massive media experiments with little sensitivity for the humans behind the screen. But even as editors and owners clash and journalists and technologists are pitted against each other, a movement of collaboration and experimentation rises, growing stronger everyday. A growing contingent of pioneers have been working on the ground to build the new frontier of news. Many of them organizing through the global grassroots movement of Hacks\/Hackers , where I\u2019m now the executive director. In just five years, a community of 60,000 people around the world has grown in more than 80 locations. From every avenue, people flock to this space where journalists and technologists work together outside of their normal workplace in environments that encourage collaboration, community, and creativity. Reflecting on technology\u2019s disruption of journalism Emily Bell recently declared : \u201cNo serious news organization can expect to have an audience or a future if it hasn\u2019t already worked out its place in the digital ecosystem.\u201d I\u2019ll add my own call that the ecosystem of the journalism industry requires an awakening to a collaborative and supportive environment where we unify to better serve public information needs. That movement is growing. There are communities actively embracing the unification of journalism and technology all around the world. (Are you part of one? Take this quick survey .) It will continue to expand as a space of inclusivity, cross-disciplinary experimentation and where diversity is valued. Not only will that integration become mainstream, but I predict that in 2015 we\u2019ll see it flourish with an increase of creativity and imagination in how we solve public information needs. Here are three ways I see this happening: People-first strategies We\u2019ll see more projects like Melody Kramer\u2019s People Not In News Commenting On The News embark on active listening and communicating with audiences in new ways. Those conversations will inform innovation in reporting and design methodologies and continue to revolutionize the ways we keep communities informed. Experiments in cross-disciplinary teams, including community, arts, research, and data Projects like the documentary Broken City Poets from Youth Speaks and the Center for Investigative Reporting pair poetry and investigative reporting to share stories of the community in Stockton. In 2015, Hacks\/Hackers launches its own creative experiment piloting Convergences , conjoining arts and community to collect, analyze and tell stories with data. In this case, we\u2019re looking at the changing skills of the modern journalist and the shape, scale, vitality, hybridity and dynamism of the growing Hacks\/Hackers network. Multi-language tools and strategies will emerge As we increasingly communicate with global audiences, discoveries will be made that leverage illustration, the arts, and software engineering to explore multi-language tools and strategies to help people share stories across wider communities and discover ways to open up access to information. Jeanne Brooks is the executive director of Hacks\/Hackers.",
    "title": "More listening, more collaborating"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/freelancing-sucks\/",
    "story": "Freelancing sucks. Everyone knows this: the freelancers, who are forced to beg for months-late checks; the editors, who surf on an endless sea of referrals, looking for unicorn writers who turn in copy clean and on time; the readers, who get the short end of the content stick when writers are rushing to work quickly to justify their unlivable wages and editors don\u2019t have the room to build relationships with writers more than one story at a time. It\u2019s a broken system, based on bad economics. It\u2019s like the Abilene paradox of employment. All parties know they hate it, but they still get on board anyways. The good news, though, is that its stranglehold on the publishing economy might be loosening. Starting with The Atlantic a few years ago, savvy digital folk began seeing the wisdom of putting people on staff rather than just negotiating shallow contracts. The Atlantic had great success with this, hoovering up large swaths of young editorial talent and working them hard. To a smaller degree, Gawker, too, built up staff writers rather than simply rotating in writers (although the perma-lance sitch was not great). This, of course, is how newspapers and other union shops used to work: When I started at the San Francisco Chronicle a million years ago, I was contractually forbidden from writing as an editorial assistant at the organization. Freelance rules were that tight, to discourage cheap, disposable labor. And now, as Vox Media and BuzzFeed have shown, freelancing is not a necessary evil in a digital media world. When I worked at BuzzFeed, one of the most striking things was the emphasis on staff culture. Sure, we had freelancers pitching, but it didn\u2019t comprise nearly as much of the writing as other places I\u2019d been, including the Chronicle. And as far as I can tell, Vox Media has also grown to employ many, many writers and editors on a full-time basis. This makes good sense to me. In all things, you get what you pay for \u2014 if you aren\u2019t sinking resources into your writers, it\u2019s hard to ask that much from them. As an editor, when I want to assign a breaking story, I look around to staff. It doesn\u2019t seem fair to pay someone $200 for a post but then demand it be fast and good. And beyond fairness \u2014 most freelancers just won\u2019t do it! They can\u2019t! They\u2019re juggling gigs, with their time spoken for. Of course, there will always be people who love freelancing \u2014 and occasions when freelance or contract work is mutually beneficial. And it doesn\u2019t make sense to increase staff willy-nilly: A company\u2019s head count is a very delicate thing, subject to so many factors. In 2015, though, I think that competition for editorial talent will grow even stiffer, and throwing freelance crumbs at writers who are looking for a full meal just won\u2019t cut it. But even as I solicit freelance work (please pitch me!), I\u2019m happy when I lose a good writer to a staff job. It was my fault for not hiring them in the first place. Reyhan Harmanci is a senior editor at Fast Company.",
    "title": "Freelancing sucks"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/personalization-reaches-newsrooms\/",
    "story": "Ten years ago, EPIC 2014 warned of automated algorithms entertaining the masses with frivolous news items made relevant by their routines online. Today, companies like Facebook are struggling to learn what newsrooms have long known: Presenting readers with personally relevant news is both science and art. In 2015, affordable tools analyzing a wealth of reader data will finally enable newsrooms built in the industrial era to compete with the Silicon Valley (and Alley) upstarts. Personal reading recommendations will become a important tool for these publishers in the months ahead. Learning from Google , news organizations will make multivariant testing the norm. No longer will there be a singular front page \u2014 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\u2019s strength even as it reflects the reader\u2019s unique interests. 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. The reader\u2019s trust, though, may be tested by the appearance of increasingly targeted ads and articles. To avoid the privacy pitfalls Facebook and Google encounter , publishers will need to develop a new kind privacy strategy. Privacy can\u2019t just be a compliance issue \u2014 it must come from journalism\u2019s principles of truthfulness and accountability. Technology will continue to challenge the business model of news, but journalism can\u2019t be afraid of the changes. People are eager to read those stories reported by a focused newsroom that knows its purpose. Publishers supporting experienced editors with intelligent recommendation engines will find they\u2019ve attracted the attention of the very audiences needed for their businesses\u2019 survival. Craig Saila is director of digital products at The Globe and Mail.",
    "title": "Personalization reaches newsrooms"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/more-data-fewer-questions\/",
    "story": "body { background: whitesmoke !important; }\n.simple-post-wrapper { max-width: 100% !important; width: 100% !important; }\n.simple-body { max-width: 1200px; width: 100% !important; padding: 0 0 25px 0 !important; }\n@media screen and (max-width: 800px) { \n.jerthorp-mobile { display: block !important; }\n.jerthorp-desktop { display: none !important; }\n} Jer Thorp is an artist who works with data and software.",
    "title": "More data, fewer questions"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/management-is-both-the-problem-and-the-solution\/",
    "story": "I confess I read every single article I came across about the drama at The New Republic \u2014 every insider account, every critique of the magazine\u2019s history, every defense,\u00a0every extrapolation to all that\u2019s\u00a0wrong with digital or legacy media, every complaint about all the complaining,\u00a0and every last piece of gossip. And not just because I work at a 90-year-old magazine that\u2019s also in the middle of turning itself into a digital media company, though not a vertically integrated one. (Here\u2019s a pretty good explanation of the history of that idea, by the way.) But also because TNR \u2014 like First Look Media and The New York Times back in May, which feels like years ago now \u2014 is a case study of the consequences of weak management. Whether or not media organizations see themselves as businesses, they\u2019re all organizations , and they\u2019re all going through huge cultural and strategic changes. Like pretty much every organization of any kind, they\u2019re staffed and led by people who are flawed and unpredictable at the best of times, and who rarely handle difficult situations with enough grace and courage. Management principles are so often misunderstood, misused, and easy to mock. But if we take the right ones seriously and apply them with empathy, wit, and an appreciation for the particular details of whatever situation we\u2019re facing, they will help us all keep on doing what we love: the news. My hope for next year is that more of us in the media will live up to just two principles, which are both easier said than done. Figure out how to explain what your strategy is in plain English (or in any language other than business jargon). If you \u2014 and everyone in your newsroom \u2014 can\u2019t do that, you don\u2019t have a good strategy. Understanding how the organization plans to sustain itself and grow isn\u2019t a violation of Church and State. Your most important responsibility, if you\u2019re a manager, is to hire and fire people for the right reasons at the right times. Be brave and honest about these decisions, and no matter how awful or relieved you\u2019re feeling, treat everyone involved with respect. Katherine Bell is editor of HBR.org, the website of the Harvard Business Review.",
    "title": "Management is both the problem and the solution"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/bad-community-is-worse-than-no-community\/",
    "story": "2015 should be the year your digital publication rethinks its community strategy. First question: Do you really care enough to do it right? As Kyle Chayka wrote this week, people are increasingly retreating to safe spaces . All the best conversation is happening in GroupMe, Slack, WhatsApp, private email lists, or over drinks after work. People feel comfortable analyzing, debating, and joking in these places, where they can express themselves without fear of judgment, unwanted notifications, or death threats. We can\u2019t say the same about many discussion platforms or public comment sections. And that\u2019s too bad, because the web is an interactive medium. Let\u2019s hope we never again see the phrase \u201cJoin the Conversation\u201d as a call-to-action below an article. But going forward, where should that call-to-action even lead? Medium fights Godwin\u2019s Law by rethinking comments as something closer to distributed annotations, allowing users to engage throughout the article. Reddit\u2019s upvoting system gives its most engaged users control over what\u2019s amplified. Metafilter reinforces community guidelines and cultural norms thanks to a highly engaged readership , 24-hour moderator coverage, and tools developed over 15 years. On most Vox Media sites, authors and moderators regularly stay engaged in comments and forums, encouraging civil conversation and removing comments that violate community guidelines. That\u2019s the sort of work required to keep those spaces respectful, safe, and rewarding for participants, and it\u2019s not always easy or successful. In a year when Pacific Standard and Popular Science shuttered their comments, Vox.com launched with none . Twitter functions well for RSS-style broadcasting, or for lighthearted status updates from straight cisgendered apolitical white men. But the year of #ferguson and #gamergate made it clear that Twitter is broken and downright toxic for nearly any other purpose, or for any other set of users. By coupling a format that encourages intimacy with a network design that encourages out-of-context amplification, Twitter has evolved into something fundamentally volatile. It\u2019s fun, fast and powerful, but remains highly risky for anything approaching honest conversation, or even satire. This fall, Paul Ford, on a whiskey-infused whim , created something called tilde.club , where people granted shell access can\u2026publish some HTML. Browser default fonts and starfield backgrounds promptly flourished. But what at first seemed like a nostalgic throwback quickly resonated with possibilities missing from the modern web: Thanks to relative server obscurity and the technical barriers to entry, people felt safe and downright excited expressing themselves on Tilde\u2019s public pages. Thanks to a context-reset of a blank canvas, much of that expression came with an honesty and openness that\u2019s been sadly lacking on the web for several years, as personal blogs have given way to streams and apps. The environment for both reading and creating on Tilde is much different from the experience of posting to Medium, bantering on Twitter, chatting in iMessage, ignoring middle school friends on Facebook, reblogging on Tumblr, or replying to a thread on Gawker. What context does your site or product set up for the conversation you want your audience to have? There\u2019s a widespread notion now that every media company must also think like a technology company, investing in the platforms that power the creation, presentation, and distribution of our content. But if we truly want to engage with our readers, we also need to put in the time and resources required to create and maintain safe community spaces. We need to articulate to ourselves and our users what those spaces should be for, and why the effort is worth it. Audience engagement in 2015 will either require interacting with readers on (often noisy) social platforms we don\u2019t control or devoting the resources required to create and maintain healthy community spaces ourselves. Or both. We need to be thoughtful about what context we create to guide conversation, and how we engage with the people who are willing to interact to create value and a rewarding experience. But not everyone in the publishing business needs to be in the community management business. Bad community is worse than no community. Feedback and conversation around published work will increasingly happen in spaces you can\u2019t see, or forums you don\u2019t like or understand, and in ways you can\u2019t directly influence or control. If you don\u2019t care enough to take on the responsibility of creating and maintaining a safe space, just disable comments , add a \u201cShare on WhatsApp\u201d button to your article template, and focus on the things you can do well. Ryan Gantz is director of user experience for Vox Media.",
    "title": "Bad community is worse than no community"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/cut-the-excuses-diversity-takes-work\/",
    "story": "Patriarchy, it\u2019s time. You\u2019ve had a good run there, turning a blind eye to diversity on one hand and trumpeting meritocracy on the other, as though both those things together means you\u2019re so gosh-darn focused on quality that you just don\u2019t see race, gender, or class. But the jig is up, and has been for a long time \u2014 the only difference is that in 2015 you\u2019re going to have to do something about it, because it\u2019s starting to be at best a headache and at worst a hit to your bottom line. This year has brought issues of diversity and privilege to the forefront of the conversation \u2014 and with it, a lot of swift public outrage. That outrage, facilitated by social media , has for the first time, begun to reliably reach the inner sanctum. And suddenly, that inner sanctum has had to address it \u2014 uncomfortably, contritely, irritably, faux-apologetically, or maybe, just maybe, with the first real glimmer of awareness that when times are changing, leaders get out in front of that change. That time seems to be, well, now. Organizations are getting caught flat-footed with all-male boards ( hi Twitter! ) and excruciating diversity numbers ( don\u2019t be evil, Google! ), and the ensuing public pushback has prompted public hand-wringing ( getting there, Microsoft! ) and actual progress ( lean in, Facebook! ). There\u2019s a clear business case for diversity (duh \u2014 you are an idiot if you think the best decisions are arrived at by a slate of clones), but on a more urgent level, there\u2019s a PR case and it\u2019s that kind of pressure that accelerates the march of progress ( well hello, GoDaddy ). Organizations don\u2019t like being subject to a barrage of angry tweets, and like it less when it balloons into boycotts and mainstream news stories ( jury\u2019s still out, Uber ). Most of the time, the org braces for a few days and then the story passes, which is why we see lineups like The Wall Street Journal celebration of dudes in April and Web Summit in Dublin or, just this week, Business Insider\u2019s all-white all-male list of Startups to Watch in 2015. But those of us who keep an eye on such things are seeing incremental change (Gigaom\u2019s 22 percent women in this conference is still a serious improvement ) \u2014 and even better, we\u2019re starting to see other people keep an eye on such things. (See The New York Times\u2019 Margaret Sullivan ruminating over byline disparities . Of course that was in April, when The New York Times could boast a female top editor. A glass cliff sure can change a landscape!). Ergo, quotas. Not out of generosity or an earnest commitment to changing the ratio \u2014 please, nothing hates change more than the status quo \u2014 but out of urgency. Organizations are realizing that actual diversity results takes effort and commitment, and can\u2019t be waved away with an obligatory seminar and vague promises to do better. It comes down to making it a priority. And when something is a priority, it becomes someone\u2019s job. And lo! In November, I saw something that made my heart leap: Bloomberg went there. From Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler\u2019s memo to staff: \u201cAll Bloomberg News enterprise work must include at least one woman\u2019s voice, and preferably a balance of men and women. Women are engaged in every topic we cover. Our journalism should reflect that variety.\u201d This felt like a huge step \u2014 and one that will not only ease headaches for Busy And Impatient People In Charge but will also actually make that coverage better and smarter, because it will include a broader range of perspectives and thus stories, angles, and insights. So bravo, Bloomberg! I look forward to the spread of that ethos to the actual slate of Busy And Impatient People In Charge (Who No Doubt Got There On Merit) . Baby steps. I\u2019ve 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 \u201cdiversity\u201d may bring eyerolls (and if that\u2019s you, mofo, check yourself because you\u2019re perilously behind) but it\u2019s also bringing headaches, and power doesn\u2019t 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? \u201cWe tried!\u201d is no longer an excuse. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t find anyone qualified!\u201d is no longer an excuse. \u201cI asked my three white dude friends and they couldn\u2019t think of anyone, but look, they suggested these other three white dudes, and oh, the merit!\u201d is not only no longer an excuse but, honestly, just an embarrassment \u2014 so seriously, just keep that one to yourself. It\u2019s not a question of \u201cjust checking a box\u201d \u2014 because in 2014, we now know that the ranks of the under-represented and over-qualified are thick with great candidates. It\u2019s a matter of making it a priority to find them, book them, list them, feature them, hire them, promote them, invest in them, cultivate them, and pay them. The tide is turning. Hello, quotas! See you in 2015. Rachel Sklar is cofounder of Change The Ratio and TheLi.st .",
    "title": "Cut the excuses: Diversity takes work"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-news-mixtape\/",
    "story": "First we had homepages. Next we got streams. Then we saw a return to newsletters. So what is the thing for 2015? This will be the year of the mixtape. Not quite the cassette tape you made your high school crush, but similar in sentiment. If the rise of podcasts and newsletters has taught us anything this year, it\u2019s that there\u2019s value in consuming bundled content. But there\u2019s not a great experience for reading packaged text on the web yet. Readers are finding their way to news sites not through any cohesive experience \u2014 they\u2019re stumbling across links shared on Twitter or Facebook or sent to them by friends. These singular entry points make it harder to engage a reader in the long term. Once you land on an article, news sites are desperate to keep you browsing, discovering, clicking. You\u2019ve got your social media share links, most read stories, most popular stories from all over, staff recommendations, prompts for newsletter signups, even online games! (Not to pick on The Washington Post \u2014 we\u2019re all guilty of \u201cdesign cruft.\u201d) A one-sentence news story really highlights design cruft. pic.twitter.com\/Oig7JMM7kW \u2014 Brian Boyer (@brianboyer) December 17, 2014 Instead of trying to capitalize so heavily on an individual story, this year we\u2019ll move to bundling articles and ideas. We\u2019ve 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\u2019ll approach stories less as atomic units themselves, but rather as subunits that can be packaged within a new type of content primitive: mixtapes. A mixtape can be highly personal. A mixtape reflects the taste and opinions of its compiler \u2014 tastes are so idiosyncractic. Every mix is a carefully crafted window into a person. A mixtape can range from songs linked by theme or mood, to a list of casual favorites \u2014 the form affords a variety of different situations and use cases. Mixtapes will help us achieve five things for news this year: serendipity, intimacy, discoverability, engagement, and curation. Serendipity What I love about reading an actual newspaper is the delight of coming across stories I normally wouldn\u2019t go out of my way to read. But since it\u2019s right there, hanging out in the middle of the page just waiting to be seen, I\u2019ll read it. With the perpetuation of the following model across the web and the increasing reliance on algorithmic surfacing of content, I fear we\u2019ll lose the serendipity of news. In the 2000s, a number of mix-swapping communities were formed. Each member was assigned a month during which they were responsible for sending a mix to the rest of the group. People got packages from individuals they\u2019d never even met, a \u201crefreshing exposure to music that [you] wouldn\u2019t necessarily go out and look for.\u201d Intimacy We\u2019ve heard a lot about podcasts this year. Maybe you\u2019ve also heard a lot of podcasts. There are valuable lessons from that medium we should try adapting for text. Podcasts lend a certain intimacy to news. It\u2019s easier to connect personally with the voice that\u2019s literally inside your head. We have control over what we listen to and when we choose to listen to it. The same goes for reading \u2014 we select what to read and when it makes sense to read it. Though more often than not, we\u2019re not reading serialized content. 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\u2019s not just a cold link, but rather something with personal notes. Discoverability Mixtapes also provide a means of discovery and sharing (as touched on in the discussion around serendipity). They\u2019re a great promotional opportunity for bands who aren\u2019t going to be on the radio. What about for the non-Ezra Kleins or non-Alexis Madrigals? The power of mixes was that anyone with a cassette player (initially) could create them. What if our readers weren\u2019t 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. Engagement By selecting, juxtaposing, and ordering unrelated stories, mixtapes take a usually passive act \u2014 reading articles \u2014 and makes it active. If readers turn into active participants by curating and collecting our stories, engagement then becomes about more than social shares or comments. They\u2019ll be engaging with content on a different level, creating something new from existing content, as opposed to simple promotion. The whole is other than the sum of its parts \u2014 by carefully selecting and ordering posts in a mix, readers can create an artistic statement greater than the sum of individual stories. There\u2019s something to be said for selecting and sequencing a group of stories to explore a theme, create a particular mood, or evoke an emotion. Curation The web is a vast collection of linked documents, and the way we approach content on the web needs to stay flexible. In our world of endless, overwhelming streams of information, curation plays an increasingly important role because it gives readers a finite constraint on what they\u2019re consuming. In hip-hop, mixtapes were a way for DJs to stay at the forefront of taste-making. We\u2019ve seen sparks of this in newsletters, which often have a \u201cWhat I\u2019m reading from around the web\u201d section. See What We\u2019re Reading from The New York Times. Some people are avid readers and well regarded on a certain subject. Instead of having to write something from scratch, they can start creating a mixtape of recommendations. It\u2019s going to be an exciting year. Katie Zhu is an engineer at Medium.",
    "title": "The news mixtape"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-first-45-taps\/",
    "story": "How do we know when a news app is successful? Since joining BuzzFeed a few months ago, I\u2019ve learned that there is little consensus within our industry regarding how we define and measure success. So I started speaking with people outside of news to learn how they know when to celebrate or commiserate. One of the most important lessons came from conversations with those responsible for building incredibly addictive games: Optimize a person\u2019s first 45 taps. Mobile gaming publishers reliant on in-app purchases, like the studios responsible for Candy Crush or Clash of Clans , obsess over each individual thumb tap a player makes after first downloading a game. I\u2019ve heard this referred to as optimizing the first 45 taps. (Why 45 taps instead of 30 or 60? Honestly, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a precise science behind the first 45 taps. My best guess is that 45 hinged on the rules and mechanics of a specific game and this became a useful heuristic for game developers. For editors and product managers leading their news organizations into this discussion, the real number might be closer to 15 or even 10. What matters to me is learning how mapping taps can help improve decision making, and then figuring out what number range is applicable to news.) Game designers plot a player\u2019s ideal first 45 taps to increase the likelihood that a player will enjoy this new game, crave more rewards, play the game again, and start spending money. Designers observe new players by mapping where these players actually place their thumbs, collecting data to reveal where players deviate from an expected path. This data is used to identify exactly where a player is more likely to fail or quit, pushing designers to start iterating on this specific part of the game. Finally, this data becomes the basis for benchmarks used to evaluate the next crop of new players. Let\u2019s assume I launched a candy-themed puzzle game roughly three months ago and wanted to evaluate a player\u2019s initial tap flow. Here is an excerpt from a first 45 taps report: Tap 1 : She opened the app. (Last 30 days: 95% of players performed this function. Last 7 days: 93% performed this function.) Tap 2 : She tapped play. (Last 30: 92%. Last 7: 93%.) Tap 3 : She followed the first instructional tutorial and swapped a red jelly bean with a green chiclet. (Last 30: 92%, Last 7: 92%.) Tap 9 : She connected three purple clusters to complete the first level. (Last 30: 88%. Last 7: 89%.) Tap 28 : She detonated a piece of wrapped candy. (Last 30: 52%, Last 7: 28%. Note: Game exits are 4% higher at this tap comparing over the last 7 days) 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\u2019t 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? Are your answers ready? Noah Chestnut is the product lead for BuzzFeed\u2019s upcoming news app.",
    "title": "The first 45 taps"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-year-you-get-hacked\/",
    "story": "This prediction is reaching you too late \u2014 your news organization is already in danger. This is the year you\u2019ll get hacked, or phished, or you\u2019ll give away more information about a source than you intended. This is the year you have to start caring about digital security. We\u2019ve been too slow to understand security and the implications it has on our journalism. When newsrooms hesitate to embrace technology, we face greater risks than a drop in pageviews: We jeopardize sources and compromise the integrity of our information. Just recently, we\u2019ve been reminded how damaging internal document leaks can be. We\u2019ve learned how easy it is for others to track us online \u2014 and offline . And we\u2019ve seen attackers breach publishing systems and social media accounts . It\u2019s long past time for newsrooms to start caring about the security of their communications. The hackers, phishers, and whistleblowers of the world aren\u2019t going to wait for us to figure out encryption. The longer we wait, the more stories we miss, the more information we endanger, and the harder it is for us to adopt secure practices. The days of burner phones and clandestine meetings in a parking garage may not be entirely behind us, but we can\u2019t rely on those methods alone. Increasingly, our information and communications take digital form: We chat and email our colleagues, we store confidential documents on our computer or in the cloud, and we depend on a huge array of software to help us do our jobs. The less we understand about the way our data is stored and transmitted digitally, the greater the risk we run of it being used against us. 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\u2019re posting online? Are you up to date on the security releases for the software you use at work? And what about your readers \u2014 how much privacy are they granted ? Security isn\u2019t convenient. When you\u2019re 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 \u2014 really high. Fortunately, there are journalists and technologists already working on this problem, and they\u2019re working on how to make it easier for you. The Freedom of the Press Foundation released SecureDrop , a submission system for anonymous sources already in use by several news organizations. At Source, Jonathan Stray provides resources on security basics , including how to protect your accounts, encrypt your disks, and plan for security vulnerabilities . ProPublica reporter Julia Angwin has created guides to encrypted messaging and safe web browsing . Security isn\u2019t easy, but it\u2019s going to matter more and more for news organizations. And if Taylor Swift can do it , so can you. Katie Park is a graphics editor at The Washington Post.",
    "title": "The year you get hacked"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/reducing-the-cognitive-burden-of-news\/",
    "story": "The most robust conversations about the future of journalism will be led by thoughtful marketing professionals. And the best of their efforts will yield valuable results because they understand the news product and the audience not as two separate entities but as parts of a symbiotic pro-social relationship. Here\u2019s why that matters. From an October report from the Pew Research Center , we know that 57 percent of adults are interested in government and politics. The good news is this beats the 44 percent who are interested in entertainment and celebrities. But here\u2019s the troubling part: When asked what three topics they are most interested in, only 36 percent put government and politics in their top three. And worse, there\u2019s evidence that some \u2014 perhaps most \u2014 of those people are lying. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as social desirability bias . Some people are inclined to overreport prosocial behavior, such as being mostly interested in government and politics, and underreport undesirable behavior \u2014 say watching reality television. George Gallup, the grandfather of political polling, detected the influence of this bias on the news industry in the 1920s when he was a University of Iowa doctoral student. \u201cIn no single instance did those who said they had read all of the paper actually read more than forty per cent,\u201d Gallup wrote in his dissertation . So it\u2019s not just that they all lied \u2014 they lied big. Gallup\u2019s work served as a lens into the future of the pulls on the news business. \u201cAll means of entertainment \u2014 the radio, the moving picture show, the automobile \u2014 which take the time ordinarily devoted by a reader to his paper, are competitors of the paper,\u201d he wrote. In the 75 years since, we\u2019ve added a host of other distractions \u2014 hello Facebook, YouTube, and reality television \u2014 to the list. In addition, the cognitive burden involved in following a governmental or political issue can be substantial. In research conducted by Vivian Vahlberg and myself, with funding from the Chicago Community Trust, the Knight Foundation, the McCormick Foundation, and the Woods Fund of Chicago, we know in Cook County, Illinois \u2014 home to the epicenter of Chicago and its politicians\u2019 malfeasance \u2014 49 percent of adults felt like they had enough information about candidates or issues to vote in 2010. Of course, that figure is likely inflated too. We also found evidence of what we called \u201csignificant personal distress in dealing with the news.\u201d Almost half of adults said they feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available to them. In the same study: 41 percent said they have a hard time telling what news in important; 40 percent said they don\u2019t have time to keep up with the news; and one quarter said they find the news difficult to understand. Many news organizations have chosen to ignore evidence such as this. Anecdotal evidence with regard to the manner in which people, especially millennials, consume news is oft discussed in newsroom \u2014 the ability to create and share content, the differential meaning of likes, shares, and comments; and the satisfaction of individual preferences by selectively consuming (or not consuming) media. But too many journalism organizations have neglected the abundance of data and retreated in one of two disappointing ways. They\u2019ve either retrenched into the \u201cwe\u2019re going to tell you what we want because we know better\u201d mindset \u2014 or they\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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. Local television stations and newspapers, cable stations, news magazines, websites, and apps should embrace this audience-centric perspective. We need them to tell important stories from a perspective about which the audience cares and in a manner which enraptures them. What we need this election cycle (because there\u2019s no risk in predicting that coverage of the 2016 presidential election will ramp up in the next year) and in future ones are well trained, ethical journalists who embrace a deep understanding of their audiences under the guidance of thoughtful marketing professionals who use consumer data, theory, and experience to inform their insights. Overcoming the cognitive burden felt by news consumers is not marketing in the pejorative sense. It\u2019s journalism, in the mold of the best of the Fourth Estate. Rachel Davis Mersey is an associate professor at Northwestern University\u2019s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.",
    "title": "Reducing the cognitive burden of news"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-year-of-yes\/",
    "story": "I conducted a programming study 10 years ago that showed the gatekeepers of public radio were, on average, 45-year-old white males. This generation of architects \u2014 whose passion and commitment have given us a strong institution that is now in the midst of change \u2014 is beginning a 5- to 7-year peel-off \u2014 another aspect to the phase of change we\u2019ve all been talking about for nearly 10 years. Physics tells us that chaos is a time that\u2019s sensitive to influence. The shift in leadership across the industry, the generation of new and diverse producers hungry for a shot and with a passion for public service media, and the continuing advancement in technology \u2014 all conspire to make for a year of unprecedented opportunity. So where are the tides pushing us, and what cues should we pay attention to? A golden age of talent. The Serial podcast from This American Life is the latest demonstration of what happens when you use a strong brand as a platform for talent. The demand for high profile talent, and investment in promising new talent, will increase. Diversity on the move. Speaking of new talent, more organizations will walk the talk of welcoming minorities into the production and management ranks. We\u2019ll see new appointments at the networks and national organizations and more aggressive recruitment by stations and other nonprofits to attract minority talent. And the definition of minority will become more commonly understood, and meaningful, too. We like Ben Smith\u2019s operating principle : \u201cenough people of a particular group that no one person has to represent the supposed viewpoint of their group \u2014 whether ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, gender identity, socioeconomic background, or disability.\u201d The birth of distributed innovation networks. Big and exciting changes are under way for the legacy distribution model. For nearly 45 years, public media has pushed programming out and across the interconnected system of 1,200 radio and television stations, first via satellite and more recently via digital technologies. We\u2019ll see new networks fashioned around knowledge sharing and complex, carefully coordinated collaborations. (Keep your eye on Curious Nation, iSeeChange, and Frontline.) A broadcast renaissance. The old saw, broadcast, is ripe for innovation. We\u2019ll begin to finesse our understanding of how traditional platforms drive a holistic media experience. Fresh eyes, fresh ears will consider how to shake up what is still the largest converged audience in public media. I have my fingers crossed on this one. We are in a finite cycle of change. We need (and will create) measures for that which is now unmeasurable \u2014 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\u2019ll slip out of the chaos and back into a predictive cycle. For now, everything\u2019s moving fast. It\u2019s an unsettled time. The best attitude for navigating the next year is one of receptivity \u2014 understanding that so many things are opening and expanding in ways we can\u2019t perceive. Our strategic mantra for 2015 is \u201cYes.\u201d Just say yes. Sue Schardt is executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio .",
    "title": "The year of yes"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/many-more-eyes-in-the-sky\/",
    "story": "As drone journalism goes mainstream, the effect could be as significant as the arrival of the 35mm camera in the 1920s. After the 1929 financial crash, photojournalism reinvigorated American print culture. Luis Marden pioneered the use of cameras in natural environments and underwater. Marden gave readers an initiation to marine life and photographic technology. News organizations such as Life magazine made their living out of the new possibilities of photography. In 2015, robots will take on a larger role in crisis journalism, changing coverage of natural disasters, protests, and armed conflicts. This will affect what crises are covered and how. Drone use in 2015 will build on several years of steady growth in their use as journalistic tools. In 2011 at Occupy Wall Street, Tim Pool owned and used a Parrot AR drone named the \u201cOccucopter\u201d to stream live videos online as the action unfolded. In December 2013, drones were in the air during the civil conflicts in Thailand, seeing civil unrest as well as tear gas, water cannons, and lumps of concrete thrown at the protesters. In early 2014, drones recorded the protests against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Drones have also helped journalists to cover floods in England and fires in the Australian bush. News organizations such as the BBC and journalism schools will develop more drone units. Already, the University of Nebraska\u2019s Drone Journalism Lab and the University of Missouri\u2019s Missouri Drone Journalism Program have integrated drone research into their educational mandates. Life magazine could be reinvented to take advantage of the new possibilities of drones, in much the same way as it pioneered photojournalism and showed readers the world in visual, rather than textual, form. Robots will permeate our understanding of the world through crisis news. Drones going mainstream has serious implications both for the future of journalism and for researchers of journalism. Val\u00e9rie B\u00e9lair-Gagnon is executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.",
    "title": "Many more eyes in the sky"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/native-helps-pay-for-the-news\/",
    "story": "2015 will be the first year where native advertising programs will be in place at nearly every serious news organization. Native advertising isn\u2019t new, but the near-wholesale adoption of native at organizations with serious journalism credentials certainly is, and that\u2019s a pretty big deal. 2014 saw the launch of native programs at places like The New York Times, The Texas Tribune, and Talking Points Memo (where I happen to work). All of these organizations saw significant digital advertising revenue growth. The Times saw a native-driven digital advertising increase of 16.5 percent in the third quarter, and at TPM we saw a native-driven annual ad revenue boost of nearly 70 percent in 2014. Now, I know that to some people reading this, the term \u201cnative advertising\u201d might still seem more suspect than the phrase \u201cvertically integrated digital news company.\u201d On more than a few occasions, I\u2019ve found myself explaining my bullish position on native to very skeptical journalist friends. But what\u2019s most interesting to me about native \u2014 aside from the fact that it can\u2019t be automated and scaled via networks like banners \u2014 is that it plays to the very heart of serious news organizations\u2019 strengths. Quite simply, native advertising is advertising for people who read things . And I think that\u2019s totally pivotal for journalism. It\u2019s pivotal because after years of publisher disintermediation and advertising commoditization, we\u2019ve 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. Now, I think relying only on the sponsored story as a native delivery mechanism has done native a bit of a disservice; it\u2019s allowed those not intimately involved in the guts of all of this to assume that all native is somehow about trickery or deceit. I\u2019ve been very far down the belly of the beast, and I can assure you that\u2019s not the case. At base, native simply eliminates the synthetic behavior of the click. Instead of expecting someone to click on an banner ad and exit, say, The Guardian\u2019s website to engage with content from Toyota (which, mind you, only 0.03 percent of people actually ever do \u2014 on a good day), native puts that content directly onto the site where people are already reading and engaging with lots and lots of stuff. That\u2019s about as dark as any of this gets. I predict that 2015 will be the year that publishers will start to think beyond just the sponsored story as a way to deliver native. This will increase native\u2019s performance for advertisers, and it will also increase native\u2019s credibility with readers (and with the journalistic community at large). Ken Doctor recently detailed one of the new ways we\u2019re delivering native content at TPM here , and I\u2019ve recently seen a handful of interesting non-story post native executions at places like The Economist and The Washington Post. Native makes advertising more complex, and I think complexity makes advertising a whole lot better. It replaces boxed ads featuring pictures and aphoristic slogans with long arguments and infographics. In 2015, I think the smartest news publishers will start to build native products that strip away the PR fluff that is inherent to a lot of current native \u2014 products that leverage data and facts to help advertisers communicate to news audiences in real, meaty, intelligence-respecting ways that no banner ad ever could. Like I said, at TPM we\u2019ve grown our ad revenue by about 70 percent in 2014, and that increase is largely attributable to native. And we\u2019ve done this while still maintaining a clear, ethical division between our business and editorial teams and maintaining journalistic integrity. TPM is a very special place; we are fueled by the belief that if you\u2019re idealistic and passionate about journalism, you need to be equally passionate about the business of journalism, too. This past year, the publishing team at TPM had a total blast building the skeleton of a native economy that we think will help fund the news for many years to come. And I hope that in 2015, other serious news organizations will have a blast building that skeleton too. Amanda Hale is vice president of advertising and creative solutions at Talking Points Memo.",
    "title": "Native helps pay for the news"
  },
  {
    "url": "http:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2014\/12\/the-season-of-seasons\/",
    "story": "When you think about it, it\u2019s kind of strange that digital stories \u2014 both web series and things like podcasts \u2014 have \u201cseasons.\u201d The beginnings and endings of these seasons are often completely arbitrary; I watched one series whose first season ran from November to May, and whose second ran from August to November. With Netflix and Amazon releasing entire \u201cseasons\u201d of their shows in one drop, you\u2019d think the concept of the season might be dying. But the reverse seems to be happening: More types of digital stories are shaping themselves into this format. This will probably not be the first or last prediction to name-check Serial , but there it is, a podcast \u2013 notably, a podcast originating in a non-seasonal show \u2013 just wrapping up a twelve-episode season. High Maintenance decided to charge for its second season on Vimeo, after the first garnered so much acclaim. Telltale , the video game company responsible for 2013\u2019s game of the year , releases several of its games in seasons. The digital season isn\u2019t usually like your classic TV season. (I mean, TV seasons aren\u2019t even like your classic TV season anymore.) For one thing, digital shows seem to start and stop at entirely random times in the year; for another, the number of \u201cepisodes\u201d is as arbitrary as the timing of them. (In some contexts, I\u2019ve heard things like\u00a0Serial\u00a0and\u00a0High Maintenance\u00a0referred to as \u201cmini-series,\u201d which is closer to a classic television concept.) But it turns out there\u2019s genuine value in the concept of the season, and I suspect the concept will start making further incursions into media and journalism in 2015. For some storytellers, the season offers a decent frame for making multi-episode story arcs, in the mode of Serial, or to bundle together a set of episodes to raise funds for, as 99% Invisible does . For audiences, seasons suggest a finite commitment \u2014 not a one-night stand, but not a marriage, either. For sponsors or advertisers, seasons are a great conceptual fit with the idea of the marketing campaign. In newsrooms, we tend to talk a lot about \u201cprojects\u201d or \u201cseries,\u201d and it\u2019s worth noting how these often differ from \u201cseasons.\u201d Projects are more nebulous than seasons; they can take the form of a multi-day story intended to grab the news cycle for a week, or they can stretch out indefinitely, with installments appearing at random. The life cycle of a season \u2014 House of Cards and its ilk notwithstanding \u2013 is usually a few months, with weekly or semi-weekly episodes. When we think of seasons, we don\u2019t usually think of text; they\u2019re typically video, audio, or interactive programming. Seasons target subscribers\/followers\/binge-watchers. If you sample only one episode, you\u2019re not really watching the show. The stories that compose a newsroom project, on the other hand, are meant to stand alone. Nobody would presuppose that everyone read every installment. This might be the most important difference: Newsrooms often spend most of their attention on launching projects. But the momentum of a season builds towards its finale . A season\u2019s beginning is an event, certainly, but especially if the last season-ender was terrific. 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 \u2014 primary season, campaign season, election season \u2014 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?\u00a0What would an investigative journalism project look like if it were organized and released as a season instead? Lest I be accused of trafficking in thought experiments rather than predictions, here it is: Over the next 12 months, I think a news organization is going to give us a compelling answer to at least one of those three questions. Matt Thompson is the incoming deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com.",
    "title": "The season of seasons"
  }
]