 Thanks for making time for us. I'm Karen Runlett, Knight Foundation Journalism Director. I am so excited about today's program. Every year the leaders at the Neiman Journalism Lab ask a question about the coming year. It's simple. They ask, what do you think the new year will bring for the future of news and journalism? Except this year we are going through 2020, the year journalists covered a global pandemic and a turbulent economy. The year we saw massive protests for racial justice around the world and newsrooms examining their own records of racism. A year of hurricanes and fires and a national election with the highest turnout in US history, one that's still being contested. To talk about 2020 and the future of an informed nation are Neiman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen and senior writer Josh Benton. Hi. Hi. You're joining us. So Laura, why don't we start with you? Let's just set the stage. Journalism as an industry has really been ravaged by the pandemic, specifically advertising. So why don't you just tell us what does digital media news journalism look like right now? Sure. Yeah. So it's been a crazy year. There have been sadly thousands of newsroom layoffs and furloughs partly due to the pandemic and partly just due to sort of the continuing trends that we see as a lot of news organizations can't make it in the transition to digital. We see people have less free money free to pay for the subscriptions that so many news organizations are counting on now. We have newspapers consolidating hedge funds that are not the best owners buying them up. We have a racial reckoning going on in newsrooms and across the country. It's been a big year and then of course there's the election which I mean probably one of the most consequential elections of our lifetimes news organizations trying to figure out how to cover a president who refuses to concede and who has done more to spread false information than probably any other source in the country right now. It's coming from the top. So it's been a busy and weird year. So obviously that's really heavy. Are there some promising new entrants to the field at this point? Yeah so I see a couple of great spots. One of those is that there are news organizations that are doing super well. The Atlantic would be one success story with just it's really fabulous and interesting reporting around COVID and tracking that data. The New York Times has more digital subscribers than ever. We've seen some new newsroom, new digital newsrooms launch like the 19th which focuses on women and politics in the United States. So there's definitely been you know bright spots amid all the bad news this year. Thanks Josh. So Neiman Lab has been collecting predictions since 2011. You coming up on a 10-year anniversary. So let's just start with who makes these predictions and how do you select them? Well it started out with a very small package of maybe 20 or 30 people who I sent an email to and said hey you got any thoughts for the new year? Over time it grew and expanded into the megalith that it has sort of become. We now publish over 100 predictions a year. I have a massive spreadsheet of a few hundred names that get an invite every year. Throughout the year we do our best to try and notice new people. We have a channel in our Slack where we are constantly noting this is an interesting person. Let's invite so and so to and to give a prediction this year. And as you said it's a pretty open request. I will acknowledge that many of them are less predictions than sort of wish ideations. They're describing where we think we should go as opposed to where we are going. But you know I think that's probably more useful as an industry exercise than just saying advertising is probably going to drop again next year. Yes absolutely. I know there's no right or wrong with these. You both emphasize that Laura are there one or two trends that you think leaders have been focused on in recent years? And then I want to hear from Josh on that but Laura what are your thoughts? Yeah I think a couple of trends that came up last year that we have definitely seen just so much around this year. So one of them was about these changing notions of objectivity in newsrooms and this reckoning around race. How can we expect reporters of color to report on these issues in a so-called like a mutual way? Like that is something that we saw sort of get hinted at a lot in the predictions last year and I think it was such an important issue this year with the Black Lives Matter protest across the country and newsrooms just trying to figure out like how to cover them. Another trend I think that we saw a bit of you know what Laura we actually have one of the predictions why don't we just pop that up from Tanya Mosley since you just basically you know shared that with everyone is really important. Do we have that from NPR? Yes just as Laura was saying this is from 2020 Tanya is saying trust me every person of color in your newsroom has a story about how a manager questioned either their news judgment their diction or whether they could be neutral or objective. Laura please continue I just wanted to make sure we saw that. Sure yeah so I think one of the things that we've been forced to do this year that I hope more newsrooms are doing too is thinking about like what does objectivity really mean who defines it and is if there's no sort of they're sort of like you can't anything of the best way to talk about this. I don't think you can ask people to be quote unquote neutral about things that affect their own lives so directly so maybe if you're a white man you feel as if you can report on protests on a very racist president and his supporters maybe you feel as if you can report on that in a neutral way because it doesn't affect your your own life very much at all for the people who are actually dealing with these issues every day who are shaped by them. I think that we just really need to change sort of the idea of the kind of experiences that we that we want reporters to bring into their reporting. We always aren't reporting to be fair but I think this idea of being objective is something that really needs to be examined and something that probably needs to be less emphasized everybody has everybody has a view everybody comes from somewhere and I think just acknowledging that would would help us go a long way. Okay I think though that Tanya was sort of expressing too that don't necessarily her words are very much about don't necessarily you know don't necessarily pigeonhole me around don't necessarily question my news judgment that's one thing she pointed out. Josh I'd really like to hear sort of what are the surprising trends that you've I mean you've been with this for so long what are the surprising trends that you're sort of noticing. And I would I would note that I would say the the we saw an increase in the number of predictions that were related to diversity issues to to discrimination in the workplace issues and diversity and coverage issues several years ago was sort of an early warning for what really blossomed more broadly this this year. And a lot they sort of split between or both they contain both the micro level the interactions of an individual employee and the interaction sort of along the lines of what Tanya Moseley wrote about as well as the broader implications of what it means to be informing a public with a blinkered set of informers I suppose. You know I think we've seen trends go up and down over the years some of them have matched along with technologies as they've become hot or cold. We certainly saw a wave of interest in VR a few years ago that has tapered off that we don't see very many of those anymore. We had quite a few blockchain predictions a few years ago and those didn't didn't go very far. I think that there's a lot of there are lots of debates around business model issues I think you can you can map the growth in the interest of paid models you know digital subscriptions being important. And I think you've also seen some back and forth around the issues of journalists going independent. This was the sort of thing that would have been discussed in a blogging context 10 years ago. More here it's more in the context of newsletters and substacks which you know in some ways is repeating a lot of the the same journeys that we've been through. So it's we try our best to draw from a very wide range of people from journalists and academics and technologists and you know researchers and we hope that we're getting something like a high level 30 000 foot view of the field. Great thank you. I just want to point to a couple of other really interesting predictions that came from last year. You know there was a very different kind of election this year. Many of us were home. There was much more early voting. There was mail-in voting and there is a prediction that came from Madeline Sanfilippo and Yafid Lev Aretz from CUNY's CUNY's Bird College and Princeton and that really talked about coverage of 2020 and gerrymandered news coverage as hyper personalization and geo targeting are applied at scale in news apps and mobile push notifications. I thought there were some really interesting tensions between the local conversation, the state conversation, the national conversation about how we received information from different leaders and how that played out in the election. So what can you tell me from your reporting Josh about this particular prediction? Sure. I don't think that we saw a huge rise in the specific technological context that that prediction was addressing the use of news apps and push notifications, primarily because most people don't use any news apps and most people don't rely on new push notifications to get their news. Last statistic I saw was only 19 percent of Americans said that they had gotten or learned about a news story through a push notification in the past week and a lot of those people tend to be more engaged voters who probably have an idea of what they're trying to do, what they want to vote for. I do think you saw a version of that though with the rise of text messaging. I think lots of us received lots and lots of text notifications, text messages from campaigns, from volunteers, we're text banking instead of the phone banking. As we've seen the polling industry respond to the shift to mobile phones over the last two decades and we've seen the difficulties that is created in their methodologies, I think you've seen campaigns wanting to make a similar sort of move into texting where phones would have been a method before. I think that you're right that we saw that the experience of being a candidate in Atlanta is different from being a voter, excuse me, in Atlanta is different from being in Cambridge Massachusetts. The messaging that gets sent to you is still is very tailored. I think campaigns did find though that it's still a lot easier to tailor those messages on Facebook or on Twitter or on YouTube where the enormous amount of customer data that those platforms have has for good and for ill enabled a lot of very direct targeting. Great. Let's turn now to some of our 2021 predictions. At night we're very concerned and focused on local journalism and local news and repairing that and strengthening that and the future of it. Let's just talk about some of the predictions. One that I'm familiar with and it comes from Rachel Shalom, the deputy editor for digital at Fortune, the rise of nonprofit journalism. You see what she says here. As anyone who has attempted to be a changemaker in a storied workplace knows it's easier to build what you want from the ground up than attempt to change the processes, priorities and personnel in an existing structure. Now there's real tension going on in the field between the idea of whether a nonprofit is the way to go versus a for-profit. We talked about digital transformation right at the top of this. Are the organizations that exist? Are they able to do enough fast enough to be competitive? Laura, can you talk a little bit about more nonprofit news and what's going on with for-profit organizations? The Black Press, Legacy Newspapers. Sure. I think it's definitely easier as Rachel points out in her prediction to sort of think about these issues when you're starting from the ground up than when you're trying to turn a massive news organization around. It can be done both in both ways. I think we're seeing news organizations grapple with that, large and small ones, but it's easier if you're sort of building it in from the beginning to talk about it, I think, and to sort of work out solutions for it. I think something that I think has been interesting with nonprofit news organizations that we've seen launched this year is that they have been focused more on audiences that maybe haven't been targeted as much in the past. So the 19th focusing specifically on women and politics, Capital B, which is launching in 2021, focusing specifically on Black audiences. I think some nonprofit news organizations in the past have been focused sort of more on, that we've seen launched in the past, have focused on sort of individual topics, things like criminal justice and education and things like that. And I think it's interesting to see these new ones come up that are attempting to reach new audiences in different ways. We have a question from Trista Thurston about maybe what you're seeing for smaller newsrooms and local newsrooms. I think that small and local newsrooms have definitely struggled this year, I think in a lot of ways, small local newsrooms have been hit the hardest by some of the advertising losses around COVID just because they have less of a cushion, they have sort of less of a safety net. And so some smaller news organizations have closed some local news outlets have closed just because of lack of funding. And it's tough out there. I think we've seen a few sort of interesting startups in this area. So one of them is VoteBeat, which was launched by the funder of ChartBeat. VoteBeat is focusing on sort of granular reporting around local elections, being very nimble and putting reporters in communities around the country to vote on sort of like the election and its aftermath. Maybe replacing some of the kinds of reporting that larger news publications have just had to cut out. And so I think it's interesting to see sort of ways to be creative about that and put local reporters in places where maybe they hadn't been able to be due to funding issues previously. Okay, we are taking questions from the audience. So we've already gotten one from Trista. So Trista Thurston, so if anybody else wants to join in, please do. Okay, Josh, let's look at another, another, you've got, you have about, is it 18? Posted at the moment? Somewhere around there. Yeah. Okay. So some of them already- Then you wanted to post it over the next week and a half. Of course. You post them as they come out. So Mark Stenberg, a reporter for Business Insider. We have a prediction from him. And he basically says, I've noticed that the difference between influencers, creators, and journalists seem to shrink every time I check on it. Reporting on Nacho's sub-stack, but Patreon, Cameo, Twitch, and OnlyFans, I find myself struck more by the similarities than the distinctions between entertainers, artists, journalists. So Josh, if you could talk a little bit about the reporting, and there's been a lot of conversation about independence, as you said, and sub-stack, how is your reporting sort of, what does your reporting have to say about this trend? You know, it's interesting. I thought that was an interesting prediction by Mark, and I think it's true on one level, and maybe not as true on another. In the same way that an individual celebrity might be making money on the side by doing cameos for 30 bucks a pop or 50 bucks a pop, whatever it may be. Those celebrities still work in movies, or work in a TV show, or work within the context of a larger organization that has a corporate entity that has licensing deals. The independent part of the entertainment business, and the story that Mark is talking about, is significant, but it's still much smaller than the institutionalized business that these folks are being a part of as well. And I think what he's identifying correctly is that the balance between those two is forever shifting. If you wanted to be an independent actor as a journalist 40 years ago, even a freelancer then was still reliant on publications to take their articles and to, you know, pay them every once in a while. Let's hear, I have stones starting around newsletter, something like that. The path to true independence was a very, very logistically difficult one. Now it's available, and that means for certain people, those who have an existing following that they can bring with them, those who have a specific type of reporting and or commentary they do that is attractive to the marketplace. And that is the sort of work that can be readily monetized. Great. That's still only a share of the tens of thousands of people who do important journalistic work in this country. And I think for those folks, the institutional model is still going to be the main way to go for some time. Okay. I also wanted to mention another prediction that we have here from Erin Foley. We've talked about race. We've talked about the conversation in newsrooms, some of it very heated, very angry. And Erin is actually talking about a solution that could really help young diverse journalists. And he talks about joint ventures and reporting collaborations, not operating agreements between general market publications and community weeklies and metro dailies. Laura, would you talk a little bit about those trends and how they're playing out? Absolutely. Yeah. I think partnerships are an amazing way both for larger news organizations to publish some coverage that they may not have reporters covering to get just to broaden the scope of what they published. And it's a great way for the smaller news organizations that are reporting these stories to get more eyeballs on their work. I mean, I think we've seen all kinds of news organizations doing this. So it's not just those, you know, community weeklies, it's places like ProPublica that are doing these joint publishing collaborations with other news organizations, things like that. I think partnerships are just a great way to get more work in front of more readers, partly because it's not as if people really go to home pages very much anymore. People are not even probably getting, like most people are not going to the New York Times homepage even, for example, every day. They're definitely not going to the home page of these small nonprofits and local news sites and things like that. So getting this work in front of more people, I think is a great thing. I think something that you want to be careful of in these partnerships, and we've seen this in our reporting on the logistics of just how this works and, you know, sort of what some of the pitfalls can be, what some of the sort of pain points can be, is to just have the partners be very communicative about sort of what they both are wanting to get out of this and to sort of be talking about what these partnerships are going to look like so that one side or the other, you know, doesn't come away feeling resentful or that the smaller organization doesn't come away feeling as if its content is being, you know, used without any real benefit. Yeah, definitely in the night research and in the grants that we've done, we've definitely seen the stronger partnerships. They really have a memorandum of understanding upfront to really make sure that there's equity there. And the, the, I'd like to go to another prediction that we have here. And again, this is from Ben Ward-Mueller, product developer and open web advocate in place of the monolithic super platforms that were the hallmark of using the internet over the last decade. We see a, we see smaller independent publications and websites that address the needs of their communities more closely across our devices. We will have a single place to read all our newsletter subscriptions powered by feeds and email. Again, we, we talked about the theme of independence, Josh, and what this sort of looks like. This sort of points to that as well. Would you share some of, again, would you share some of the reporting around this trend? Sure, yeah. It's a, in some ways, it's a, it's an attempt to revive what we had with RSS readers and Google reader about 10 or 15 years ago. You know, I think it is, I'm perhaps not as optimistic as, as Ben is about the idea that people will flee Facebook and flee Twitter and flee YouTube and the giant platforms that have established so much cultural power and financial power over the past 10 or 15 years. It would certainly be an improvement, I think, if people did move towards smaller communities, smaller platforms, more dedicated to specific tasks or specific cultures, whatever it may be. I just don't know if that is a trend that can be, that is easily stopped, is easily prevented from being eaten by one of those giant tech companies. I mean, what is the closest equivalent to that right now? Probably Facebook groups, which is part of the megalith, but is nonetheless trying to offer this smaller social experience within it. There's still a lot of forces printing towards aggregating power in those few companies in Northern California. You know, one thing that I think will be very interesting for 2021, I haven't seen a prediction about it yet, but is what will happen with, with anti-trust enforcement, Google and Facebook. If there's anything that is going to reverse those, the giant sucking sound, as Ross Perot might have put it, going towards Silicon Valley, I would think it would have to be something coming out of DC and coming out of Brussels. I would love, yeah, I would love to just jump in quickly with one more thing about that. I'm mentioning the markup, which is another very, you know, success story newsroom that launched this year, that's sort of looking at algorithms and the kind of things that tech companies don't show us how those are impacting our daily lives. I think it's interesting to think about how people are still reading and subscribing to these newsletters, which is through Gmail, and you can subscribe all you want. I have a bunch of newsletters that I subscribe to on Substack that I would, that I would like to have in front of me every day. And, you know, you still see that Gmail filters things out, it hides things, it doesn't necessarily put the things that you subscribe to right in front of you. And I think it's sort of a reminder of how you can sort of seek this stuff out to an extent, and you can subscribe and you can support it. And even then, there are going to be sort of tech companies kind of in the way. I don't know that we've really completely achieved this vision of having content just come directly to you. There's still sort of an intermediary. And so that's something I'm thinking about with this prediction is like, how do I make sure, even if I want to subscribe to all these newsletters and get them how, like, what is the best way for me actually to be reading them? We have a couple of questions from the audience. Laura, specifically to you, you were talking about not the best owners, and there is a question just around not the best owners buying newspapers and newspaper chains. So how do you just a little bit more clarity on how do you define a bad owner? Oh, sure. I mean, I guess I should probably just say that I think hedge funds are bad owners for newspapers. That's the trend that we're seeing is that hedge funds are buying them up, consolidating them, trying to make the most money off of them. And I don't think that when owners are trying to maximize profit that that's a good thing for news. So one thing we've seen is local newsrooms shuttering, even if they still have employees, they don't no longer have a physical presence. That's something that's happened, especially this year with COVID just offices shutting down and not coming back. I think it also means if you're trying to maximize content, your revenue from content, you're going to publish certain stories that audiences that sort of get a lot of clicks and you're going to see less nitty gritty local type reporting that these publications might have been able to do in the past and with these new owners can no longer do. So I think it's really tricky. Josh, thank you. Thank you, Laura. Josh, I there's a an appreciation for your observation about sort of VR and blockchain. And this is this is a question asking for a bit of an observational trend on these kinds of forecasts over the years sort of. Is there sort of a bit of a forecast maybe the trends that you're reporting on? Because again, you're not making your own predictions exactly, but on just the work, the process. Yeah, I would say that when we started doing this a decade ago, there was it was relatively fresh out of the financial crisis. Things were still very difficult in the business. And there was a huge focus on the business model question that was that was core to what everyone was thinking. As a result, the predictions, I think, matched that as well. I think over time, it's not as if the business model has been solved. It's not as if we figured it all out, we can all go home. It's more that I think there is a sense that the problems are a bit baked in at this point. There isn't some giant money truck coming around the corner. So on the business side, there's been a shift towards more strategy within the large buckets of advertising and more specifically around subscription. You've seen a lot more thinking about the customer relationship in predictions in recent years. I also think you've seen a increase in people talking about working within news organizations. I mean, we mentioned that in the case of the Tonya Motley prediction and issues around discrimination, but a larger attention being paid to from the mental health of journalists to working conditions, the rise in unionization, a lot of digital digital newsrooms, things in that front. And we've also seen more predictions that are around the consumer end of journalism. This was really sparked by 2016 and the rise of fake news and misinformation and disinformation. I think our predictors care more now about how their news is reaching the end customer more than would have been the case a decade ago. At least, that's how it looks in from point of view of our predictions. I think in general, it's a healthy trend that in all of these cases, you're seeing a shift away from we need to find something that will fix our problem as a business more towards we need to figure out how to get better in a host of ways. And I think it's a useful trend, a useful shift. Yeah, absolutely. I just sat in a grantee meeting yesterday where we talked about mental health of journalists, but we also talked about mental health of audiences. We talked about the fact that if you look at any kind of self care article, it will say stop reading so much news, stop listening to so much news. And what does that mean for the consumer and how are they interacting with something that we think is so important for democracy. So that question came to us from Andrew Devagal. We have one of the things we published, I published a prediction today from Marissa Evans who's at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And hers was all about the degree to which newsrooms are going to have to be much more comprehensive in how they deal with reporting on the trauma that Americans have felt in 2020. And she made the observation which I thought was a smart one that when we have thought about trauma informed reporting in newsrooms, it has typically been around victims of sexual assault, the survivors of the victims of mass shootings, things that are criminal in nature. Whereas many of the traumas that Americans have experienced in 2020 have been around unemployment, have been around stress for the election, have been around obviously enormous public health issues. Things that are much more systemic that don't have the news hook of a shooting, for example, to hang your coverage on. And she had a line there along the lines of, it's going to take us years to figure out to really be able to address the amount of trauma that the American public has suffered in the past year or so. And that's going to have to change the way that newsrooms cover those issues. Absolutely. I have a question I'm not sure which of you guys wants to take it. It's from Jenna Spinell. How should journalism students, particularly those graduating this spring, we're already walking into a tricky economy, be thinking about the industry and their place within it and what can journalism school faculty be doing to help them? I can talk about that. I mean, whenever I talk to college students, I always try to emphasize the degree to which all of the digital technologies that have arrived in the past decade plus have enabled individual journalists to take much more initiative than was the case when they had everything had to be approved by an editor and work through a newsroom chain of command. 15 years ago that the answer would have been, hey, start a blog. Now it is probably figure out a niche that you're interested in covering and start a podcast and start a substack about it. But I think it's really important for journalists who have gone through journalism school and may be ready, may be well prepared for a institutionalized form of journalism to be very aggressive and ambitious around doing independent work and showing that initiative. I think both A, that's very appealing to the editors who will be hiring in news organizations. They want that same spirit in their news operations. But even if it's not, you open yourself up to a whole world of more options if you can try and play the journalism game on several different levels at the same time. I also think that one sort of possible right spot of the pandemic, if I can say, that is that in-person events are not really happening right now. And so a lot of the education, the panels, the classes that you might have had to be in person in New York taking in the past have moved online. And so for people who want to take advantage of those, and there's so much, there is greater access to that. So that's one way that some more people may be able to participate than have in the past. I want to thank you both for joining us. I do want to give you sort of a final word or a final thought just really on something. Look, 2020 actually started out, nobody exactly understood what was to come. And we walk away at least with knowledge of a vaccine coming. So I'd love to leave on a little bit of something to look forward to in 2021, something that you reported on that you think is especially anything you might mention about local journalism or local news, but other examples as well. Thoughts? Sure. Yeah. So one thing I might say, and this is not specifically only about local news organizations, but it's certainly something we can do. I think at the beginning of the year, especially when people were thinking about the election coming and sort of how news organizations had covered Trump over the past four years, I think that there was a lot of fear that news organizations would not be able to rise to the task and cover some of these issues, things like Trump lying, just being sort of Trump saying just things that are just not true, that news organizations would continue to have trouble sort of reporting on that. And I think we have seen a lot of them find their way in terms of the way that they are reporting on what he says, the way that they're reporting on what other sort of right-wing figures say. I think that the reporting has gotten better and more nuanced and that reporters have gotten more practice at sort of thinking about how to convey these things to audiences, convey that just because someone said it doesn't mean that that's true and providing context and things like that. I think that any news organization can get better at doing that and I feel optimistic having seen them get better at it. I think it's going to be especially important as the vaccine, as you mentioned, rolls out that we think about, the newsrooms think about the types of misinformation that can be spread around health and medicine and the vaccine and coronavirus sort of moving away from election-related misinformation. We had a piece on our site this week from first draft about that and thinking more about health misinformation and how are we going to be thinking about that issue and conveying information about the vaccine and its rollout and quite a few things like that to our audiences in a way that is true and doesn't scare them and takes into account the fact that there is still a lot of misinformation out there. I'd also agree that I think that with, I don't know if we can say that the Trump era is in the rearview mirror yet it certainly isn't officially according to the calendar but I think that the media can definitely look back at the last four years and realize that the Trump era has been quite good for American journalism and I don't mean that in the Les Mounves, like you know he might be bad for the country but he's good for CBS sense. I don't mean that purely financially. I mean that this administration has been an opportunity for journalists to rethink a lot of their workflows, how they think about important issues, how they think about the needs to address parts of the country that they weren't doing as well as they might have. I think it's also been an experience that has really trained a lot of people to be willing to be willing to pay for digital journalism in a way that just wasn't the case four years ago and I think that's something that can be taken forward into 2021. I am very curious to see what a Biden administration does to the tenor of news consumption and of news production in the country. So much of our news world has been so focused on one man. I'm not sure how the environment we've built up to cover that one man will transition to a very different sort of man who will not be hogging as much of the stage and human attention. I also think if on an optimistic note, I do think that we are seeing a set of recipes for local digital startups become a little bit more clear. I think that new startups are not having to reinvent the wheel to the same degree they might have a few years ago. There are sort of established patterns and I think there's an established audience waiting for digital news at the local level that I wouldn't have said was there a few years ago. I would be shocked if there were more American journalists employed at the end of 2021 than there are at the end of 2020 but I do think that there are and we have a host of challenges around polarization and people sort of checking out of the news. I do think there are reasons to think that things are getting a little bit more stable in some important ways. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you, Josh Benton. Thank you, Laura. Laura Hazard Owen. You can follow them both on Twitter at Jay Benton at Laura Hazard Owen and Neiman Lab of course. Thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for everybody for listening. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.