The future of news

Building a newsroom technology culture

I like to say that journalism treats technology as something that happens to it — like an asteroid. But technology is too important to the future of news for it to be treated passively.

[...] Building a strong technology competence inside a newsroom is existentially important. Given journalism’s platform dependence, it’s vital to build and shape the technologies that newsrooms rely on in order to function. Given journalism’s cultural dependence, it’s also vital to ensure a newsroom understands how the internet is building and shaping culture — not just at the periphery, but as a core part of its own culture.

Dispatches from the media apocalypse

The principles of experimentation, curiosity, and empathy that are the hallmarks of great journalism must also be applied to the platforms that power their publishing and fundraising activities. They must foster great ideas, wherever they come from, and be willing to try stuff. That inherently also implies building a culture of transparency and open communication in organizations that have, on average, underinvested in these areas.

AI won't live on publisher sites

My proposal is this: you should consider what’s actually the most useful experience for the user, rather than what furthers your own interests, and make a bet on that, instead.

When people trust humans more than brands: the incubator newsroom

Rather than hand-wringing about whether a particular publication should survive, I think we should instead consider the value of newsrooms to journalists. If we believe that journalism is a societal good, but that existing newsrooms might not survive, then we might consider building new scaffolding that addresses the value they currently provide.

No, newsrooms don't need to cede control to social media.

Should publishers build community on platforms owned by third parties or publish to a space fully under their control? The answer is an emphatic “yes”: you have to do both. Social media platforms are ephemeral — they are hugely popular but will appear and disappear — while your website is forever. Your digital strategy has to encompass both the near term and the long term.

The internet is up for grabs again

Just as it isn’t clear which networks will succeed in the next era of the web, it’s not obvious which newsroom experiments in community-building will work. The answer can only be to try, learn quickly from failure, and try again. Newsrooms will necessarily need to experiment and learn from each other. Ideally, they will collaborate on these experiments, sharing both code and approaches.

The web floods

Newsrooms that commit to AI-driven storytelling as a way to cut costs while increasing output will be lost in a sea of similarly bland content and spammy marketing. Newsrooms that cling to traditional SEO and social media tactics will find that they become less and less effective in the face of more and more noise.

Use the tools of journalism to save it

It takes a radical culture shift. The internet isn’t a broadcast medium — it’s a conversation. Instead of thinking in terms of having an audience, you need to think about building and serving a community. Instead of informing, you need to be listening. The opportunities to learn the nuances of your community and to serve it directly are unprecedented — but it takes work.