Building on previous Nieman predictions, sizable investments have been made to legacy institutions “too big to fail”, or to noteworthy journalists from prestigious institutions endeavoring to start-up a new enterprise — and not many of them people of color.

In 2017 there was a fireside chat between Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, and Ava DuVernay, the esteemed filmmaker, where DuVernay spoke about the experience of finally having a decent film budget and “being invited to the party,” when folks of color tend not to have the built-in networks to have a chance to be invited. The same goes for who gets grants and investments to do good journalism and why.

Over these last few years in particular, the world continues to dynamically change epistemologically with regard to next-generation audiences and the news industry so desperate to keep up — yet refuses to let go of many of its legacy ways. As such, making bigger bets to the entrepreneurs who have rejected secure jobs at large newsrooms and have instead started their own ambitiously designed but modestly (or, most often, anemically) supported ideas for next-generation journalism models seem like true areas of investment opportunity.

Using a race-forward lens, given the reality of next generation audiences, we might also use an ecosystem approach in identifying the existing levers of support to sustain enterprising new leaders and their ideas. Below are key points that lay the groundwork for more investors to lean into meaningful change for journalism in 2023:

• Redesign grantmaking so it doesn’t feel like the Hunger Games. It makes it hard for long-time, vetted grantees to make space for — let alone support — new ones. If the perspective is that the well is only for one person to drink from, then it’s not a resource. It is a vehicle for perpetuating the lack of creativity and unjust systemic practices around capital allocation.
• Prioritize investing in new ideas and perspectives — the same way we try to ensure that our sourcing is diversified and thoughtful for good journalism. Audit the names of the “go-to” experts and see how many times the same folks get asked for their thoughts. Examine the selection criteria and question the validity and rationale behind the vetting process.
• If you’re going outside the “usual suspects” list, follow up every “getting-to-know-you” invitation to attend a high-stakes meeting with actual support (i.e., a grant). Avoid being extractive. Partner with practitioners as true thought leaders. Show that you’re listening.
• De-stigmatize succession planning. It’s the difference between defending a status quo that is deeply entrenched and acknowledging that, through this change, there will be transformational and accessible opportunities, making way for growth.
• Realize audiences will thrive and engage in places we may not have explored yet. These can be further developed and expanded upon by those with contextual expertise and understanding.
• Use tools for rigor in pursuit of institutional accountability and flexibility to be expansive and truly equitable, instead of as an excuse for an easy no to more due diligence and exploration, or an easy yes to validate our egos and existing worldviews. More safe bets is not what the journalism industry needs to move forward for the public.

There’s a strong case for applying a racial justice lens in grantmaking and diversifying the entrepreneurial pipeline, given an industry that needs new solutions to age-old problems. There are a lot more DuVernays out there doing good work without ever having been asked to engage in the investment process. The power dynamic between funder and grantee can get in the way of constructive, authentic, and collaborative problem-solving. Re-engineering the way we choose our investments can help to move the needle in delightfully unexpected ways.

These layoffs are obviously horrible for the people directly affected by them. They also have a price we’ll all end up having to pay in the form of less local news, less original reporting, and an increase in the financial incentives to cater to society’s lowest common denominator. As an industry, the American press is in a very difficult position, though that’s been true for as long as I’ve been a part of it. My concern for 2023 has more to do with what will fill the increasingly large news vacuums and set the nation’s news agenda.

I worry that all of this will make the media ecosystem so weak that what’s left will be a mess of “pink slime” content, politically driven propaganda, and a reliance on curated material from outlets chasing new subscriptions and an ever-shrinking share of ad revenue, tied to the whims and business decisions of billionaire social media tycoons. And that’s where the moral panics come in.

Over the past few years, the right-wing media ecosystem and its preferred political candidates have relentlessly hammered away on so-called “culture war” issues. The more these media organizations, some of which operate at a financial loss but continue to publish thanks to outside funding (and because the purpose of these groups is often more about steering public attention toward their political goals than it is to operate as successful businesses), shine their spotlight on “controversial” issues of their choosing, the more that what remains of the mainstream American press will feel compelled to follow along lest they be called “liberal” — something they will absolutely be called no matter what they write, say, or produce — and that will have disastrous consequences for the subjects of these political campaigns.

In 2021, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, ran for governor of Virginia and won. He did this by taking advantage of the right-wing panic over “critical race theory,” which was brought to the public’s attention by Chris Rufo, a conservative activist. Months earlier, Rufo had admitted that the goal of the “critical race theory” obsession had very little to do with the college-level study of how racial discrimination can be baked into laws and society, but was primarily being used as a catch-all term to turn anything vaguely liberal “toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that broad category.”

Fresh off of Youngkin’s victory, the right put renewed energy into attacking LGBTQ people and stoking a moral panic using decades-old rhetoric and tropes. Republican politicians put forward bills that would restrict the availability of health care for transgender people and began labeling books that mention LGBTQ people or themes as “pornographic” or “obscene” in efforts to get them banned from school and public libraries (and, in Youngkin’s Virginia, some Republicans even tried to make the sale of two books illegal), and called anyone who disagreed with them “groomers.” Even after the Republican underperformance in the midterms, it seems the laser focus on LGBTQ people will continue from the right.

My fear, which I certainly hope doesn’t come to pass, is that more hollowed-out and understaffed mainstream media outlets will find themselves either embracing right-wing moral panics about LGBTQ people or simply not having the energy or resources to fight back against them.

For someone interested in how the politics of empire shape journalism professions, this year has been both intellectually fascinating and personally distressing to watch unfold — from the way Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was framed by the likes of CBS and ITV and the total silencing of Black and brown victims of the invasion, to how American and British media handled the death of the British monarch and tried (and failed) to come to terms with the violent and racist history of empire. Very few journalists could reckon with the feelings of those whose families experienced genocidal violence. Those that sought to remind the metropole of the brutality of the British empire were discursively punished and bullied. In these two examples, we saw journalists embrace America’s imperialistic unconscious (to paraphrase Julian Go) both in their focus on those victims that looked like those in the metropole (as was the case in Ukraine) and in ignoring the violently racist history of colonization. This is journalism’s engagement in the politics of empire at its finest.

But this should not be surprising because American journalism seems unable, or unwilling, to truthfully reckon with its colonial tendencies or its continued status as a settler-colony-institution par excellence. This land upon which we move around freely and for whose people journalism claims to be working is one in which a colonizing force landed and never really left. American journalism operates in the U.S. similar to how settler newspapers in British East Africa and British West Africa did. It covers the news to raise the concerns and issues important to settlers rather than those important to the native population. For example, before the ABC series Alaska Daily, when was the last time you heard about the continuing massive problem of missing indigenous women? Compare this loud silence to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Queen’s death or the pages and pages devoted to the “ex-royals” living in California.

With all of this in mind, my hope for journalism next year is that it takes its liberatory potential to heart — that it covers indigenous issues not because they are indigenous issues but because we are, at best, guests in a foreign land. We are guests who may often be unwanted and unwelcome but who now control, or benefit from, the colony and all its attendant powers and institutions. Instead of chastising Uju Anya or giving a platform to her bullies, maybe journalists can ask themselves what they can learn from the experiences of her family, or millions of others in the Global South.

Imperialism and its politics need to form the foundation of coverage next year. It needs to act as a connective tissue across columns and broadcasts when the disappearance of indigenous women even makes it to the news. If journalists ignore empire, then all they will continue to see are the shiny toys meant to distract while ignoring the plight of our unwilling hosts.

In that spirit of sloth, I asked my new overlords, “What is the future of journalism?” Within seconds, I felt transported to every lanyard-dangling, crappy-coffee-serving panel I’ve served on or sat through since 2002:

“Journalism is going through a period of transition, and there is still a lot of value in the work that journalists do. But the industry is going to have to change in order to survive…

“One of the biggest challenges facing journalism is the decline in advertising revenue. One potential solution is to charge for online content…Charging for content can be a risky proposition, as it can alienate readers and drive them to other sources of information. It can also be difficult to get people to pay for something that they have become accustomed to getting for free…

“The work that journalists do is important, and it plays a crucial role in our democracy.”

Not bad, right?

A lot of people — especially teachers, or professors like me — are worried about this tool. “The College Essay Is Dead,” warns a recent Atlantic piece. And yes, it does provide a way for procrastinating, slothful students to submit plausible essays. Maybe they won’t get A’s, but most of the pieces I’ve seen would likely be good for at least a B.

But I predict that editors at struggling metro dailies, or thinly staffed nonprofits that are charged with covering government bodies, will someday look at this as a boon. Local newspapers and sites are getting thin these days. It isn’t just that they’re not publishing as many Pulitzer-finalist series as they used to. They also aren’t covering as many school boards, legislative committees, real-estate sales, new-business openings, and the rest of the grist that used to fill the back pages of newspapers. Even obituaries are largely relegated to paid notices from relatives. And as this information dries up, citizens feel more estranged from the agencies that govern their lives and the officials who set their tax rates and hire their superintendents.

There’s good reason for this news deficit. After the budget-trimmers have left you reeling, you’re not going to have one of your remaining reporters mindlessly type in city-commission minutes when they could be out covering news. But if we can automate some of this commodity news, we can provide a lot more information — much of it useful, if not sexy — to people who need it.

There are pitfalls, of course. One is the concern that this will just serve as a convenient way to eliminate more staff. We’ve heard that before. “Automated Game Stories To Make Sports Writers Obsolete,” warned Business Insider about software that generates articles based on baseball box scores. That piece was published in 2010 — or about 12 years before The New York Times bought the Athletic for $550 million in cash.

The bigger pitfall is the garbage-in, garbage-out problem. You can’t simply tell an AI program, “What did the town council do today?” or “Who got arrested last week?” You have to supply it with some raw information. The box-score equivalent would be minutes from a meeting, or incident reports from a police blotter. Would that be perfect? No. Would you want to publish it unedited? No. Could it save your staff a lot of time and generate a lot of goodwill for your readers? Yes.

Editors will do this because they have to. And I think they should — because, and here I quote the experts at ChatGPT, “I believe that journalism is still a valuable and necessary part of our society.” And in conclusion, fellow journalists, I just want to reiterate that “I think the industry needs to adapt to the changes that are taking place.”

There are few things that have a better effect on governance than a healthy, locally focused news environment: representatives bring back more money and vote the party line less often, businesses behave better, polarization decreases, turnout is higher, municipal finances are better, and pollution is reduced. In other words, reliable original news about a community improves that community.

So naturally, today’s local newspapers are filled with the opposite: Wire content about national politics. Not to be outdone, their websites are full of syndicated local stories from other areas, which can be confusing to readers. They endure as ghosts of their former selves.

In 2023, I predict that a major metropolitan daily will sever its ties with the major wire services and go local-only.

There is an enduring belief that a newspaper should inform its readers about the news of the world: a broad sweep of local and national politics, sports, entertainment, and culture, all arriving in a bundle on the doorstep before dawn. (It’s a romantic image for me too!) But there’s simply too much national news available today.

Local newspapers should stop filling their published product with non-local news and focus on what makes them unique, even if this breaks from the tradition of what many expect from a local newspaper or televised newscast. I recognize that these struggling local news sources will need more resources to do this, but they are not going to attract or retain subscribers by republishing stories about non-local topics.

The glut of national wire stories in today’s local newspapers is mostly explained by the economic crisis facing local news. As staffs are repeatedly cut, there are not enough reporters to fill a newspaper with original local content. Given that print advertising remains more profitable than digital for most newspapers, there is still plenty of incentive to publish a print edition. As subscription and per-issue prices increase, however, the remaining consumers open their local newspaper to see mostly national stories that are free to read online on other sites.

In ongoing research with Trusting News, my collaborators and I show that readers hold newsrooms accountable for perceived bias in the wire stories they run. The oversimplified headlines and snarky language common to national political opinion and analysis sticks out in many local newspapers, and readers often assume editors are running wire stories because they agree with them. It’s not clear enough to readers which stories are original and which come from the wires, and there is little evidence that the wire stories provide any value except increasing the page count.

Local media outlets’ remaining advantage in the information marketplace comes from reporting about their geographic area, and by filling their pages with national news, they are making the decision to unsubscribe easier for their remaining customers. A local news source cannot merely be a pale imitation of national news, or it will have no reason to exist.

We have to face the truth. Most mainstream news outlets create harm in our communities. They misrepresent, exploit experiences, scapegoat those experiencing marginalization and even drive further harm through racist, transphobic, classist, ableist, patriarchal. and capitalist reporting. This is true of the U.K. where we’ve been working together — and on different levels experiencing harm first-hand — but it is also true of legacy media in the U.S. and around the world.

“I don’t see many people like me on the news, but I’m quite happy about that. I don’t trust the news trying to tell our stories.” This is what a Muslim woman told Bureau Local (U.K.) when trying to explain her fear of the media.

Time’s up on news outlets that operate this way for profit, political influence, and the protection of the status quo. The good news (no pun intended) is that projects like Media 2070 (U.S.), BBC and Beyond (U.K.), and organizations like The Objective (U.S.) are filling the accountability vacuum and challenging the very industry that holds up “accountability” and “holding truth to power” as its most celebrated anthems.

Tomorrow’s news industry will change as a result of this accountability. It will challenge the often heard excuse that these communities are “hard to reach” and acknowledge they have been badly served and are reached and served best when ownership and representation is rooted in communities. Just look at the growing number of community newsrooms and initiatives that put equity and community power at the heart of their operations. In the U.K., see Greater Govanhill, The Ferret, The Bristol Cable, Black Ballad, and Gal Dem. In the U.S. see City Bureau, Outlier Media, Scalawag, Resolve Philly, Tiny News Collective and the Future of Local News Coalition’s prediction this year to dream bigger or lose out.

Tomorrow’s journalism will act on multiple fronts. It will challenge the power this industry has hoarded and weaponized for too long. It will share and shift that power (Check out this, this, and this). Crucially, it will support the building of new power in communities. Integral to this is for those of us inside to stop centering ourselves and trying to own the solutions, stop looking only within our small, privileged industry and to step aside, make space, and get behind others.

This past year, via The People’s Newsroom, we ran a pilot to support those who’ve been harmed by the media to reclaim it for their benefit. In doing so, we met tomorrow’s leaders.

We met Shakria Morka, who said, “As a Black, disabled woman, the experiences of neurotypical white men who have dominated traditional journalism are directly oppositional to mine.” She called for transformational inclusion and said, “Inclusion means truly valuing the contributions, perspectives and lived experience of marginalized people and allowing us to take up paid roles.” She said the work is not inclusive “if the nature of journalism itself does not change and if we fail to rip apart harmful stereotypes and consult communities.”

We met Shazia Ali, who said that opening a newspaper filled her with trepidation as she feared what Islamaphobic slur would then show up in physical hate. Yet when she discovered Amaliah, a Muslim women’s publication in the U.K., she said, “When I go on to Amaliah’s site, “I can breathe easier. That is what news belonging feels like.” She’s now a BBC journalism apprentice, and says she’s “doing it for all the communities that the news has failed.”

Shazia’s mantra is where the future lies. Tomorrow’s journalism belongs to those who’ve been excluded, harmed, and failed by the media. It belongs to the communities that most need its power. In their hands it can be reimagined and reclaimed as a true community service that enacts positive change.

We all know there is a crisis in journalism. There is a breakdown in the business model and a breakdown in trust, and those two things are not unrelated. That is down to who holds the power and who tells the stories. This is because, for the group of people running the industry, the system works just fine as it is. Yet it’s worth remembering that they actually represent a tiny proportion of the population. It’s impossible for them to reflect the true richness of society, but if we let them, they will preside over the death of journalism.

So, we’re not going to let them. We’re going to shift this power and support the next generation of journalists, editors, and owners to reclaim journalism for us all.

The line “We take a holistic approach to reader revenue” has rolled off my tongue countless times. But what exactly does that mean? It means removing the barriers that typically stand between the business and editorial sides of the newsroom. It means aligning the entire organization around a shared understanding of priorities and stakes. It means we all play a role in reaching our goals.

Over the years, I’ve asked myself what journalism could look like if the entire industry took this holistic approach. What could we accomplish if we all aligned around a shared set of priorities? I have also seen a certain type of discourse play out on social media, on listservs, and at conferences, typically about who is getting funding and who is not. I get it. The industry is highly competitive with a strong independent streak, and funders can be fickle — and this can have the effect of pitting people against each other. Amid this, we lose sight of what’s really on the line — the communities that we serve, our strained talent pipelines, our culture, and our democracy.

Over the past five years, I’ve watched reader revenue (membership) and audience development go from being nice-to-haves to table stakes for many newsrooms. Similarly, in 2023, we’ll see news organizations adopt and embrace shared values as the way to succeed in the face of the industry’s collapse. Organizations won’t view these values as nice-to-haves, but essential to the future.

We can already look toward leaders that are working in collaboration to advance the sector together. In Chicago, 60+ news outlets joined forces to create the Chicago Independent Media Alliance and adopt a “lift-all-boats-model.” On #GivingTuesday, Enlace Latino, Documented NY and El Tímpano amplified each other’s fundraising campaigns. The Diversity Pledge Institute is rising to solve problems with people and culture that cannot wait any longer. And organizations like News Revenue Hub, the Institute for Nonprofit News, and LION Publishers are always collaborating to curate, share knowledge, and do real work to help new business models succeed.

This type of coordination is not just a win for newsrooms, but the communities they ultimately serve. If we don’t stand for communities, then what are we here for?

The subject of the suit: the Israeli company NSO Group, whose Pegasus spyware is sold to governments around the world and, the complaint alleges, was used in violation of U.S. law to penetrate the journalists’ iPhones and monitor their activities.

“These spyware attacks were an attempt to silence our sources and deter us from doing journalism,” Carlos Dada, co-founder and director of El Faro, said in the announcement of the lawsuit. “We are filing this lawsuit to defend our right to investigate and report, and to protect journalists around the world in their pursuit of the truth.”

Journalists like those at El Faro, who are doing investigative work that holds power to account and exposes corruption, are no strangers to threats, intimidation, incarceration and even violence. These are realities that we’ve chronicled extensively at Frontline: people and governments target accountability journalists in order to kill their stories and keep sources from speaking out. In recent years, though, the threat environment for journalists has intensified to include new and sophisticated challenges, like the powerful hacking tool, Pegasus.

In fact, after the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories received a leak of thousands of phone numbers it suspected had been selected for potential Pegasus targeting, and convened a consortium of 17 news outlets including Frontline to investigate with the technical support of Amnesty International Security Lab, our collaborative Pegasus Project reporting found that among the numbers on the list were those of journalists whose work exposed government corruption.

Forbidden Stories is dedicated to continuing the work of jailed, threatened or assassinated journalists. (Their official motto: “Killing the journalist won’t kill the story.”) To Forbidden Stories’ founder Laurent Richard, the invasive ways in which Pegasus could be used to put journalists and their sources at risk, coupled with the largely unregulated nature of the spyware industry, signaled a new era of threats to journalism.

“Pegasus is like a person over your shoulder — a person who will see what you are seeing, a person who would watch what you are watching, your emails, your encrypted communication, everything. So once you are infected, you’re trapped,” he says in our upcoming January documentary series on the Pegasus spyware scandal.

NSO Group, which has disputed some of the Pegasus Project’s reporting, has publicly insisted that it “has no insight” into how the governments it sells to use Pegasus spyware but says it investigates credible claims of misuse. The company says it sells Pegasus to governments for “the sole purpose of preventing and investigating terror and serious crime.” Yet our collaborative Pegasus Project investigation found that NSO sold Pegasus to governments who used the spyware to track dissidents, journalists and activists.

I believe that, unfortunately, in the year to come, threats to journalists — and to journalism itself — will continue to grow and evolve in troubling, technologically advanced, and at times undetectable ways.

But I also believe that journalists will keep doing their jobs, and that they will band together in new ways to meet the moment and fight back against intimidation — as El Faro and the Knight Institute are doing in this lawsuit; as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa is doing through coalition-building in the Philippines; and as Forbidden Stories and other news organizations are doing through the Pegasus Project.

Part of the fight back is to report unflinchingly on what happens when journalists come under attack — to seek and tell the unvarnished truth, in forensic detail. At Frontline, in the year ahead, that’s exactly what we’ll do. We’ve been filming with Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist in Russia who is in Moscow fighting authorities’ court cases against the independent newspaper he co-founded, Novaya Gazeta. We’re continuing to probe the assault on press freedom in the Philippines.

And next month, in our globe-spanning two-part docuseries with Forbidden Stories and Forbidden Films, we’ll chronicle how journalists uncovered the Pegasus spyware scandal, how they learned that other journalists had potentially been targeted, and how — in another example of journalism evolving to meet the moment — they fought tech with tech: joining forces with Amnesty International’s Security Lab, who performed forensic analysis on a number of phones to try to determine whether they had been targeted with and infected with Pegasus.

The threats journalism faces are profound and evolving. It’s a good thing that so, too, is our capacity to respond.

But in the rearview mirror, 2022 is a picture of slow progress. Many of the DEI promises have not been fully realized. Feedback from journalists is familiar and enduring — some change, not enough. And results fromNorthwestern’s 2021 survey show journalists of color are more likely to have concerns about the DEI efforts in their newsrooms.

In particular, journalists hired into roles that emphasize some kind of diversity and equity struggle to find consistent support.

As reported in an ongoing research project, a diversity and community editor who had been in the job for about a year said, “I’m tired, I’m always tired. This work is the work of change, work of equity change at a legacy organization is daunting, right? There’s no question about it. You know it’s going to take forever. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to happen.”

Women journalists of color, plagued by slow DEI progress within organizations, also find themselves targets of abuse and harassment online. In a survey of women journalists in the U.S. conducted by the Committee to Protect Journalism in 2019, 90% of respondents cited online abuse as their most significant threat. Just a year later, in an international survey fielded by UNESCO and the International Center for Journalism, 73% of women journalists reported experiencing online violence because of their work. This threat is aggravated for women with multiple identities, with Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Arab, Asian, and LGBTQIA women, in particular, facing the most severe and highest rates of online violence, as well as reporters who write about race.

The consequences are profound for the profession, which is already struggling to recruit and retain diverse talent. A survey conducted by TrollBusters International Women’s Media Foundation found that 40% of women journalists reported changing their behavior as a result of online violence, and nearly a third of respondents considered quitting the profession entirely.

The threat of online violence and the cost of deferred DEI efforts have one thing in common: News workers of color bear the burden, and these costs take a mental and physical toll. Without efforts to promote the well-being and safety of journalists of color, DEI initiatives — particularly those focused on recruitment — can create more harm.

In 2022, and likely in 2023 and beyond, it is clear that, for journalists of color, the field of journalism is hazardous.

A reporter working in DEI said it best: “Racism doesn’t just kill us with a rope around our necks. It kills us little by little. The health disparities, and the trauma, and the mental fatigue, the emotional fatigue. So those are the risks for all of us. All of us in this world who are trying to tell some of these stories. We can’t separate ourselves from them.”

Despite the grim picture, 2023’s DEI goals can support the mental health of BIPOC newsworkers, including tangible measures to address online abuse. Resilience in the face of slow progress must be supported.

Here was the richest person in the world, who assembled most of his wealth by building the world’s largest electric vehicle automaker, pivoting to being what appears to be the sole overseer of the world’s most important organizing platform with a renewed penchant for climate denialism — what could go wrong?

As is now abundantly clear, we are in a climate emergency.

The systems that created the climate emergency are built on extraction, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy — the same forces that are now powering Elon Musk’s Twitter. These systems — including policing, capitalism, and borders — are designed to separate us, commodify our lives, and concentrate power in people that are using fascism to keep it.

Every aspect of climate change is intertwined with the dangerous desire to abuse the natural world — and marginalized people — to extract wealth for personal gain. There is no justice without climate justice, and there is no climate justice without the climate movement aligning itself with all other justice-seeking movements.

In fact, according to the IPCC, these systems must be transformed. Achieving our collective goals of limiting climate change requires: “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

The good news is that none of those systems that are accelerating the climate emergency are inevitable or permanent. And what’s more, none of the systems that were designed to harm us are needed to foster a thriving planet where everyone’s lives matter and have meaning.

My prediction is that in 2023, social media will fragment — spurred by Twitter’s ongoing collapse as a left-leaning organizing space — and the social media platforms that emerge will accelerate the rise of the political power of marginalized people in U.S. politics.

I founded Project Mushroom to amplify the voices of marginalized people to achieve climate justice — and our work was just made about 100x easier because of Twitter’s ongoing collapse.

In just four weeks, starting from scratch, Project Mushroom was able to assemble a waitlist of more than 30,000 people, fully fund a $200,000 Kickstarter, and land tens of thousands of dollars in advertising deals from organizations perfectly aligned with our audience — people working for climate justice and willing to partner to make it happen. We were able to charge advertising rates at 3x the national average because of that alignment.

In short, Elon Musk just created a new era of social media: Niche verticals of like-minded people that can charge premium advertising rates and accelerate the interests of their communities.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen what happens when the richest person on Earth brings his personal brand of fascism to what was previously one of the most powerful organizing spaces ever created. Almost overnight, Twitter has lost a vast amount of its usefulness for people wanting to make the world a better place, and our feeds have been flooded with climate denial and climate accelerationism.

Project Mushroom is built as a comprehensive creator platform of like-minded folks and is intended to increase people’s ability to collaborate on meaningful projects that help change the world. This platform is being built to fit creators’ and communities’ broad needs for safety and community — not just as a replacement for Twitter.

Project Mushroom will offer at least four types of creator services: Newsletter hosting/publishing (including setup, maintenance, discoverability, and easy-to-use creator tools via Ghost), live events hosting (audio, video, in person, and creator support), a curated Mastodon-based social media network with paid moderators (that’s already live), and onboarding assistance for your followers to join you (that’s also already live).

All of these services are intended to be free for creators. Not only that, we’ll do our best to support Project Mushroom creators with sustainable funding streams that aren’t evil.

Project Mushroom will be constantly shaped by our creators and subscribers and we are aiming for a horizontal organizational structure that puts the voices of BIPOC folks at the center of everything we do.

This isn’t a typical approach for an organization focused on climate. But then again, typical climate organizations haven’t worked very well so far in limiting the impacts of climate change on marginalized people.

This is a welcome change, because it aligns platforms with their target audiences. Despite Elon Musk’s best intentions otherwise.

Below is a synthetic obituary written for the very-much-alive Glenn Danzig.

It’s well-written, convincing, and entirely incorrect. Producing disinformation like this has suddenly become vastly cheaper than it was just a few months ago, and with no marginal cost to produce this content we should expect a massive spike in its (already high!) production. Trustworthy journalism that can find a way to drown out the noise has never been more important, or more challenging.

But wildly cheap-to-produce disinformation isn’t the only threat the media faces. Wildly cheap correct information has the potential of being just as disruptive. For example, the below article could certainly rival the content produced by many SEO-focused sites.

Will there be any place at all for human-written SEO-friendly content? It seems likely that the market for it will be massively smaller, as it struggles for position in search results against a broad set of algorithmically generated content.

Other forces acting on the media industry, like the disintermediation from audience by platforms, have resulted in slow, yet significant shifts over the past decades. By contrast, the change in online content driven by autogenerated media will be just as large, and not at all slow — we should expect many parts of the media world to look quite different in 12 months than they do today.

Some headlines predicted the end of social media after scandals like Cambridge Analytica in 2018 or Facebook’s announced pivot to private messaging in 2019. Others forecast a new beginning for social media in the metaverse after Facebook’s rebranding as Meta last year.

Of course, there have been headlines about the death of specific platforms too. We read about the uncertain future of Twitter most recently, as #RIPTwitter gathered numbers in November. Many had probably forgotten that #RIPTwitter initially appeared in 2016, with doom-and-gloom predictions around the end of Twitter when Jack Dorsey decided to include an algorithm-based feed on the platform.

In 2018 the end of Tumblr was near, caused by content moderation that interrupted the pornographic lifeline of the platform. But fast forward to 2022, and Tumblr is still alive. Once the poster child of quirky blogging, Tumblr is apparently attracting Gen Z users — the same audience many commentators put in the doomscrolling-on-TikTok box.

Here’s my guess: for many commentators, predicting the end of social platforms is — consciously or not — the ultimate expression of a secret desire to put them back in the attic because we fear we will never quite learn how to use them.

Though writing this op-ed as part of a series called Predictions for Journalism, future-telling is not my area of expertise. So, I don’t know if 2023 is the year when social media will be over or not. As a guiding principle, I tend to be skeptical about any such turning points in the media industry.

The core argument supporting this latest end-of-social-media wave is the different approach TikTok has to content distribution. Since TikTok shows us content that is not published only by people we follow, for many, this is enough to make TikTok something completely different from other social platforms — an entertainment-focused platform that pivots around suggesting content based on users’ behavior more than on their networks.

Are we sure about this chasm between TikTok and the rest of the social platforms? Are TikTok’s way of distributing content and its stronger focus on entertainment enough to make the term “social” in “social media” fade?

Historically, entertainment has been fundamental in building communities and connecting people. In addition, I would argue that TikTok is not just an entertainment platform, given that it also offers news, educational content, and more.

TikTok doesn’t only suggest content based on the user’s behavior. Everyone has access to a feed featuring only content posted by people they follow. Despite views being the primary metrics of the platform, TikTok’s average engagement rate is very high.

Plus, if conversations aren’t crucial for TikTok, it’s hard to explain why TikTok was the first platform to imagine a tool to create content starting from people’s public comments — one of the most popular features on the platform.

So, if TikTok is still a social platform, though a very peculiar one, why have columnists and journalists been so ready to predict impending doom on social platforms?

Social platforms are evolving and we keep predicting their end simply because we are looking too closely at their evolution, mistaking their changes for endpoints. Social media are online platforms that allow the exchange of content among users, thereby connecting them as a network. It’s a powerful, world-shattering idea, and however many forms it will take in the future, the end of social media as an idea seems very unlikely, at least in the near future.

Every turning point in the history of social platforms is and must be an opportunity for journalists to rethink how we approach our off-platform strategies and the way we reach our audiences. This is certainly something I hope we will keep doing in the year to come. There are still many chapters to write in this story, and journalism still has a big role to play. We should not give that up if we want to stay true to serving people.

Francesco Zaffarano is senior audience editor of Devex and author of the Mapping Journalism on Social Platforms newsletter.

After creating the script with the AI-enabled Lex Page document editor, I enlisted the help of WellSaid Labs to provide the narration. With AugX Lab’s, I got a transcript of the audio and an automatic video with AI-suggested video cuts and images. To add an extra layer, I utilized MidJourney to take many of the suggested images and give them an AI boost.

I understand the wariness surrounding AI, but I wanted to share a vision of 2023 and beyond where AI is a specialized skill and some (not all) journalists will navigate their careers as those who can leverage this technology to improve the news ecosystem.

For those that prefer to read rather than watch a video, the transcript is here. While the ideas are more important than the produced video, I would encourage you to watch until you’ve heard at least two or three of the AI-generated voices narrate. Hopefully it spurs some ideas of what could be possible in the future.

It’s from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who wrote My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

It’s been stuck in my head because as someone who delivers diversity, equity, and inclusion training to news organizations and has been involved in a range of newsroom diversity initiatives, I think this is a missing piece of the puzzle.

Creating diverse, inclusive, welcoming workplaces is not about numbers; it’s about emotions. Namely: How we handle our own.

We have plenty of proof that it’s clearly not enough to just hire for diversity. Despite decades of talk and stop-and-go committees and studies, thousands of journalists say their newsrooms don’t have enough diversity in race and ethnicity. Newsrooms are quite resistant to even reporting their demographics, as the News Leaders Association encountered earlier this year.

Because once you hire that person for their perspectives and experiences, do you know how their ideas and authenticity will be received, emotionally?

For instance:

• Can someone cry in front of their colleagues without worrying about being judged or dismissed?
• Can someone raise their voice without someone else taking it personally?
• Can a non-manager ask a question of management without fear of repercussions?

If the answer to any of the above is no, know that it is not about your new employee, but about a culture that diminishes feelings.

The key is to pause and examine that defensive reaction for what that feeling really is, instead of acting on it. We won’t succeed every time, but if we don’t even try, we are creating a toxic workplace.

According to an MIT Sloan Management Review study released this year, the top five toxic workplace traits are: “noninclusive,” “disrespectful,” “unethical,” “cutthroat,” and “abusive.”

When I see those words, I see a culture that has no empathy for the human experience.

While I am thankful I worked with supportive colleagues in non-toxic newsrooms, I needed more guidance around handling emotions and people’s reactions to them — I, who prided herself in being a not-too-emotional person.

I’ve had colleagues report other colleagues for being too emotional in the newsroom. I’ve managed reporters who told me they weren’t comfortable talking to previous bosses about their mental wellness. I’ve witnessed microaggressions and failed to know how to handle it well.

And this is not healthy — for anyone.

It contributes to a psychologically unsafe workplace. And good luck trying to retain a new employee in such a culture.

To be able to create the places of belonging I hear so many newsrooms striving for, we need to be there for one another emotionally. Part of being human is to feel, so asking people to be authentic means asking them to be emotional.

To create truly inclusive workplaces means you have to be able to confront your own reactions to emotions.

Because how can you navigate people through burnout, stress, covering trauma, systemic racism, and difficult change without reflecting on your emotional response?

Why does seeing someone cry make you uncomfortable? How often do you ask your colleague how they’re feeling, and are you prepared for the answer? Can you hold space for someone’s anger at work in a way that preserves safety for yourself and others?

This is why I predict in 2023, DEI training for newsrooms will also include reflections on our emotional agility. I believe newsrooms who succeed in hiring and retaining a diverse staff will also be places where people can be their emotional selves without fear.

And we need it now more than ever as we’re confronting a collision of challenges: working and living through a pandemic, waves of layoffs and cutbacks, a vein of public distrust of the media, a steady stream of coverage about suffering, pain and loss.

As psychologist Susan David notes in Brené Brown’s latest book Atlas of the Heart, emotions “can be beacons, not barriers, helping us identify what we most care about and motivating us to make positive changes.”

All the DEI mission statements and training launched in the past few years will not lead to positive changes unless we also recognize and hold space for the feelings within us. It requires us to admit that something makes us sad, scared, overwhelmed, or ashamed. And it is in working through these emotions that we can create truly inclusive places.

For the past two decades, the news media has been grappling with a decline in ratings and subscriptions while trying its best to entertain viewers and capture clicks with tantalizing headlines.

While that pursuit for eyeballs was growing, local newspapers found themselves fighting to keep their iron throne from TV news sites, blogs, podcasts, and a whole host of nonprofits and community-focused startups. Some journalists ventured out to build their own brands on Substack and Medium. There was more than one game in town.

Social media — which was once seen as a new digital distribution model for some newsrooms — has news leadership at its mercy as Facebook threatens to remove news from its platform and Twitter sees journalists bail.

The market is saturated with information, and it must contend with a mountain of alternative facts and misinformation. These are challenging waters to navigate, and the struggling economy has created new waves of uncertainty.

A group of aspiring journalists recently asked me whether journalism is dead. Absolutely not, I said. The industry was reshaping when I got out of school, and today it looks nothing like it did then. I’m dating myself here, but few people knew what to do with the internet, and not nearly enough news leaders thought to get behind paywalls in a timely manner. Newspapermen were arrogant and reluctant. Photogs laughed at the first photojournalist carrying a digital camera, which was once considered inferior to film. Now we can’t even imagine a world without cell phones.

News — and how we receive it — has always adjusted to the times.

Look no further than the Associated Press, which was founded in 1846 and peddled news by boat, horseback and telegraph long before the 1940s, when it transmitted news across radio waves. Historically speaking, the AP has always had to adapt, literally going from telegraph to TikTok in its complete history.

This is truly the time to meet your audience wherever they are; the platform doesn’t matter nearly as much as the quality of the content.

You either adapt or die.

But I think some newsrooms will realize they’re in control. They’ll actually break up with Facebook and Twitter before Mark and Elon determine their fate. They will rebuild what was lost chasing clicks in newsrooms and get back out into the communities they neglected. And they’ll start investing in their own newsrooms to master the art of storytelling. Back to the type of accountability reporting that keeps governments in line.

News organizations have history on their side, adjusting to embrace new technology and accounting for changes in human habit. Nothing stays the same. And it is time for news organizations to look within themselves instead of desperately reaching for the trend of the moment because they are uncertain of their own accomplishments and identities.

The smart news organizations will make the necessary changes. The others are probably going to miss the mark because they’re still listening to their Walkmans.

The creators’ influence won’t go away. It will become even more significant as their communities consume content and evolve into what YouTube calls “professional fans.” Having followers as allies who consume and create content will ensure cultural relevance and create significant opportunities for creators to develop intellectual property.

One of the biggest bets around that will happen from January to March, when Gerard Pique’s Kings League is set to be played. Piqué is not a creator by himself. But he partnered with 12 top Spanish-speaking streamers to create a whole new soccer league, with each creator in charge of their teams.

Ibai, who holds the current global record for the most viewers in a live stream on Twitch; Kun Agüero (the former Argentinean footballer who has become an internet celebrity); and Iker Casillas (in his new role as a successful TikTok creator), among others, will stream each of their team’s matches on their channels, with their communities sharing and commenting on everything that happens in the seven-a-side-football tournament.

What we’re seeing with Mr. Beast launching his brands with Feastables and Beast Burger is just the beginning. The people getting customers interested in the opening of new stores are creators, not media outlets. They have communities. Publishers have audiences — a big problem for the media industry when it comes to earning money.

In 2023, many publishers will follow in the footsteps of Puck and The Generalist. A few months ago, Mario Gabriele decided that The Generalist’s paywall would not be based on exclusive content but on access to its network. Currently, The Generalist is one of the most innovative cases in the media landscape. Puck doesn’t publish regular news; they share in-depth analyses that people can read, listen to, or debate with their journalists through Zoom calls and exclusive conferences.

Relying on regular news will remain a key business for some legacy media outlets. Still, the vast majority won’t succeed if they prioritize algorithms rather than building a deeper relationship with their readers. Artificial intelligence will soon be more effective than humans at writing news; creators are making spaces where people get together to discuss and analyze the hottest stories in general news and particular niches. People spend only a few minutes reading the information but invest plenty of time watching and chatting with creators on Twitch, TikTok Live, or YouTube.

Journalists have to understand the importance of co-creation. It’s already happening in some of the newest media outlets in the U.S., but most Spanish-language media outlets remain focused on getting the big number that takes them to the top on Comscore. Next year should be when media outlets accept that times have changed and that audiences demand to be closer, listened to, and part of something more than what they can read everywhere on the internet.

Local news outlets are a vital part of civic and community life, particularly for people of color, who are more likely to trust local news organizations, feel connected to their primary news source, and depend on the media as a check on individuals in positions of power.

But despite this demand for and trust in local news, and despite recent diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the news industry, these communities remain underrepresented in U.S. newsrooms.

Here in New Jersey, the state’s largest news organizations, Gannett and N.J. Advance Media, have fallen short of promises to diversify newsrooms dominated by white men. Without the sustained intention and ability to not only recruit but also invest in and keep journalists of color on staff, DEI efforts, however well intended, will continue to be just that — efforts, not transformative accomplishments.

Such initiatives are commendable, especially given that the alternative is more of the status quo. Still, the solution to meeting community information needs and building local news outlets that are more reflective of the news audience also rests beyond the traditional newsroom in the wealth of stories, media savvy, and experiences of the communities covered.

As part of my work at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, I seek to connect with and support journalists, media professionals, and various stakeholders in New Jersey’s local news ecosystem. Part of this work involves championing DEI initiatives intended to open doors for more journalists of color and promote newsrooms that reflect diverse communities across age groups, races, gender, abilities, and ethnicities. But there’s also the opportunity to work outside of traditional channels to help support journalists and storytellers, particularly those who live in communities identified as news deserts.

In the past year, my work with the South Jersey Information Equity Project has afforded me a better understanding of the local news landscape. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with emerging journalists and storytellers to build media skills while sharing community-driven, restorative narratives often neglected by mainstream media. The experience has convinced me that local news fellowships like SJIEP will continue to emerge as a powerful tool against newsroom inequity and information gaps (or misrepresentation) in communities of color, particularly those in regions with limited sources of local news and information.

The Center launched SJIEP in partnership with the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists in 2019 to help increase the quality and quantity of local news and information produced by and for communities of color in New Jersey, primarily in Camden, Burlington, and Gloucester Counties. We hosted SJIEP’s first fellowship cohort this year to build community support, recruit local reporters, target information gaps in South Jersey, and specifically support Black media makers by connecting them with resources, funding, and platforms.

We worked with four gifted and highly motivated storytellers, all early-career professionals with varying levels of media and journalism training, to produce stories on topics ranging from community policing to youth development, health services, and thriving entrepreneurship in a pandemic economy. The fellowship included hands-on training, co-editing sessions, networking opportunities with veteran journalists based in South Jersey, and, early on, the chance for direct input from the community through a series of convenings. We also worked with media outlets dedicated to covering communities of color in South Jersey to co-publish the fellows’ stories.

Next year, we’ll expand the program with a new cohort of fellows and a new roster of media trainings, career development workshops, and a dedicated mentorship track. With each iteration of the SJIEP fellowship, we strive to build on our investment in journalists of color and, by extension, the communities they belong to, the neighborhoods they represent, and the people they serve.

Relatively speaking, it’s a drop in the ocean when confronting the historic societal inequities and injustices that have played out in the media and harmed communities of color.

Still, such fellowships provide the training that equips more storytellers and journalists to tell our stories in spaces that are just as important, if outside of traditional newsrooms.

Two years ago, Sara Watson boldly predicted in this space that we might see a return of the RSS reader, or something like it, recognizing that the world of constant email newsletters was simply impossible to maintain. But the appetite wasn’t strong enough yet.

The difference, going into 2023, is that even the Inbox Zero people are going to have a reason to complain. Left without a better way to quickly zoom in and zoom out on the state of the universe (also known as the world according to Twitter), I predict those people will reach a point of frustration in even their ability to manage email.

It is at this point that the most organized people in late capitalism will rise up about a very small matter and demand something better: An RSS for the people, open source, easily used, and not some weird niche version for podcasts or that uses AI.

Two years ago, Substack was becoming a thing, but the newest spawn of DC beltway publications based on newsletter distribution had yet to break through. But now the mix includes Semafor, Puck, Punchbowl, more Axios Locals, and new ones on the horizon like Pluribis News.

There are two types of Inbox Zero people in this world: Those who do not read any news or shop online, and those who use a lot of Twitter. You may recall them talking about how RSS readers were obsolete in a world of Twitter (after all, even Google killed Reader). Twitter could be their perfectly curated and controlled sandbox of content. Now, it’s less socially acceptable to tweet.

Contrary to what The New York Times has speculated, we are not at peak newsletter. We are just at peak newsletter via email delivery. The 10% of people who claim that email newsletters are their primary form of news consumption include among them the most anal, powerful, and high-net worth people in the country.

I predict that these people won’t stand for a universe where their email becomes ever more crowded just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter. The only way to survive in a world where multiple DC-insider publications are launching multiple newsletters and Twitter is no longer socially acceptable is to use an RSS reader that satisfies the intelligentsia and political elite.

Will we get it? It may well be that the feed from email to robust RSS reader needs an API that isn’t yet possible, given password-protected, your-and-Gmail’s-eyes-only email. RSS readers may need their own ecology of analytics in order to be commercially desirable and worthy of tech investment.

Given that tech companies have taken to these newsletters to plead their case to the beltway, they certainly don’t want to lose the readers of these email newsletters, either. That provides a market incentive to make a better, bigger, bolder RSS reader. And if Ben Thompson is right that that “text on the internet is arguably the most competitive medium in all of human history,” then there is an opportunity for a very retro version of tech disruption.

This moment will be quick and fleeting, as we already see other apps and platforms beginning to pop up, offering themselves as alternatives to what the giants of social media once were (are?). This sort of rapid evolution within our digital spaces will require news and journalism institutions to understand and figure out their own pathways to information distribution, community connection, and trust building with audiences. The ability to understand and build that product roadmap (even if it’s just a website to start) will be largely dependent on not only their markets and regions, but most importantly, who they seek to serve. This will require a constant assessing and figuring out of revenue opportunities that lend themselves to various product and multimedia strategies in sustainable and diversified ways.

All of this increasingly complicated audience, product, and revenue strategizing and mapping requires a sophistication and new way of structuring and designing internal organizations, while thinking through both short-term and long-term goals and realities. At the early stages of an organization’s growth or transformation, it may not make sense to hire a super senior full-time resource right away. It may be better to bring on a more mid-tier leader who can partner alongside a sophisticated consultant or firm that will help them grow and develop in their role, while also aiding in building systems, processes, and providing experienced thought partnership at a fraction of what a full-time salary at that senior level might have entailed.

The sustainable and thriving news and journalism organization is not going to reflect the org chart of a printing press shop. Full stop. Business, operation(s), tech, product, and multimedia talent will need to be core and integral partners and leaders to editors, journalists and reporters. They’ll need to be empowered, vs. practices like relegating a role like a “social media manager” to the bottom of a news organization’s org chart.

This sort of talent will provide a fresh and experienced set of perspectives and strategies, as well as a track record of success in other companies, industries, and sectors, that can be extremely applicable and relevant to the changes and needs of the news and journalism sector. They’ll understand what it takes to build and sustain an organization (and business operation) via some tried and true principles, some of which have existed for thousands of years.

And speaking of volatility and global integration, I haven’t even included our continuing pandemic although, at the moment, my wife has just got over Covid and I now have Covid myself — yes, we both are fully vaccinated; yes, our symptoms are on the mild side (thank you, medical research; thank you, masks, that early on when they were not easy to find in the U.S. friends from South Korea and Hong Kong shipped to us).

What does this have to do with journalism? Pretty much everything. If news organizations dedicated to evidence-based professional work and to the democratic aspiration to hold power to account survive, their work will grow increasingly difficult because it grows more and more difficult to cover a world without boundaries, where everything is related to everything else, where the sports section is also politics and business, where the food section is also about gender and about environmental losses, and where journalistic ambition correctly seeks to inform readers and viewers about social developments that cannot be neatly pegged to a given event of the day. Hats off to the brave souls who want nonetheless to tackle this.

Communicating science to the public, especially younger audiences, takes time and outreach.

For my project, I define younger audiences as teens ages 11 to 17. I picked this group, not the older members of Gen Z, because teens are often left out of the equation.

Learning from teens is not an easy task. It means being intentional with our efforts: Analyzing our competitors, doing outreach, and talking to teens and organizations and groups that include teens, especially those who are from underrepresented marginalized groups.

I’m often the FOD (first only different), a term coined by Shonda Rhimes. I want teens of today to understand that they are welcome in the world of science and news. As teens they are the experts of teens, and we value their input.

A big part of making science accessible using science journalism involves co-design and collaborating with teens, organizations, and groups. We compensate the teens who participate in focus groups for their time. By giving teens a voice to share their opinions, we learn what excites them and what they need. If we do it well, science journalism can become part of their regular routines.

The IBM Business Institute of Business Value found that 44% of Gen Z would want to contribute their ideas for product design and 43% said they would participate in a product review. The focus group serves as a method of co-design, but it does not stop there. How will this data and information be reported? Does it make sense for us and the audience? Are the resulting report and news media product accessible? Will the news media product be something that they will engage in and share with others?

Yes, the process takes longer, but it is necessary to engage younger audiences in science journalism. Representation matters.

I’m tired of the both-sides-ism, which we’ve all talked aboutad nauseam, that is still being pumped out of our nation’s top news organizations. ENOUGH already.

There are not two sides to hate. There are not two sides to straight-up lies. There are not two sides to basic human rights and dignity.

There are not two sides to democracy.

For decades, the largest media organizations in the United States have styled themselves as the Fourth Estate. A free and fair press is critical to democracy, right? Or consider that “democracy dies in darkness.”

Yet the U.S. media keeps allowing itself to be used again and again and again as a tool against democracy because it cannot break out of a completely outdated way of covering politics.

There is a difference between covering democracy and elections, government, politics, and policy. Consider the following definitions, from Oxford Languages and Google:

• Politics: “The activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.”
• Government: “The governing body of a nation, state, or community.”
• Policy: “A course or principle of action adopted or proposed by a government, party, business, or individual.”
• Democracy: “A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.”

This country’s dominant media companies focus far too much attention on politics, and not nearly enough on democracy and government. Politics, by its nature, can be divisive and polarizing and can drive traffic. It generates attractive headlines. And it’s generally formulaic, making it easy content to produce.

Anti-democracy actors in the U.S. have taken advantage of that — and the media has let them.

Moving out of this kind of mindset and into a pro-democracy mindset will take real change. It will take a serious self-reflection, the likes of which the contemporary media landscape in the U.S. has never seen. It will take rewriting of internal ethics codes, social media policies, and more.

Journalism organizations in the U.S. need to interrogate their relationship to democracy, and then stand up for the role they seek to fill. Let’s see one of our big media organizations step up and declare itself a pro-democracy newsroom, and spell out what that means and how it will shape their coverage. I’d like to see democracy mission statements, democracy reporters (which we are seeing in several newsrooms), and consistent, year-round coverage of how democracy and government works.

“The first thing news organizations have to do is announce they are pro-democracy, pro-truth, pro-science, pro-evidence and pro-voting,” CNN paraphrased New York University professor Jay Rosen as saying a year ago.

Here are a few more things I’d like to see:

• Stop platforming liars. You don’t need to broadcast or write extensively about lies about election outcomes or disinformation about how the election works unless there’s an urgent impact.
• Use clear, plain language when it comes to reporting on elections and democracy. Modifier from Resolve Philly can help.
• Drop the both-sides reporting on issues like gerrymandering and legislation that curbs voting rights. You can explain why one side wants to restrict voting, but do it clearly and don’t give them space to spew misinformation. (In other words, don’t quote them or let them speak freely on camera. If you need coaching on how to properly interview powerful liars, I love how Razia Iqbal does it at the BBC.)
• Pay more attention to headlines and ensure the language is crystal-clear. The reason the New York Times Pitchbotparody account is so popular is because of how embarrassingly true it skews to real life.
• Let your staff stand up for democracy — in their stories, on social media, and with yard signs at their homes. (Yes, I said YARD SIGNS.)
• Participate in democracy with your community. Encourage your staff to volunteer as poll workers and help coordinate voting registration events. I loved how Davis Broadcasting and The Courier Echo Latino newspaper were community partners at this recent voting event in Georgia. You gotta do more than present candidate forums when you’re pro-democracy.

Need more? Check out this thorough democracy reporting toolkit from Democracy SOS, the Citizen’s Agenda, and the new Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University.

We need this change.

Journalism as an industry needs to stop hiding behind its ethical standards and meet the moment. Otherwise, we’re going to both-sides-ourselves right into authoritarianism.

Meta reps told us in June 2022 that “link posts are trending out of style for user behavior,” the week that Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton summarized: “Facebook was born on a web browser, 18 years ago, which meant that it was at some level built around linking. That made Facebook an incredibly powerful driver of traffic. TikTok, meanwhile, was born on a phone, five years ago, which means old web concepts like ‘sending traffic’ are meaningless.”

Interestingly, there has been no reduction in Facebook traffic to Condé Nast’s brands as a whole. While we’ve experienced some differences between our news brands and lifestyle brands, we’ve seen year-on-year Facebook growth across our brands and markets.

While Meta wants Facebook to be more TikTok, reducing link posts and upping “authentic voices, native to the platform” within its walled garden, the reality is that a typical user’s feed would be pretty quiet without link posts. This has benefited our brands, as has Facebook’s move to show content to “unconnected users,” with such posts making up 15.2% of feed content in Q3. This became an opportunity, enabling us all to reach Facebook users who don’t follow our pages.

And while Meta is divorcing itself from the news and publishers, Twitter is of course in turmoil.

Twitter audiences have grown for many of our markets, but dropped as a traffic source for our U.S. brands this year. There have been notable drops in “heavy tweeters” (myself included) since the pandemic began.

Meanwhile, TikTok and Instagram are the only social networks growing as news sources, according to Pew.

Condé Nast brands had an average of 12.3 million views a day on TikTok in 2022. American Vogue had 111 million video views on TikTok the week of the Met Gala, and 382 million views for Met Gala videos on Instagram.

This growth in off-platform requires all of us to recognize that our websites are not the sole audience and revenue drivers.

We must think of each platform and its role in the audience journey, acknowledging that there are multiple touchpoints including social, newsletter, podcasts, video, and site. And we must have a holistic audience strategy and understand how to promote our brands and stories across those touchpoints.

TikTok is, of course, top-of-funnel — but it offers more than brand awareness. It allows us to build community and relationships, with potential for commerce as well as consumer revenue.

Instagram is also toward the top of the marketing funnel, less of a traffic driver than Facebook even for Condé Nast’s highly visual brands. And there are also new opportunities on the horizon, with experiments in subscriptions.

A year or so ago, when I was leading audience development, social, and analytics for Vogue globally, I drew a diagram to show how different stories speak to different audiences.

Going into 2023, we would all benefit from developing a core content model for multiple channels.

For example, what is the story mix that enables a brand such as Condé Nast Traveler or Allure or Vanity Fair to reach a wide audience? And what are the community conversations that will develop that core superfan audience?

With buyouts, pivots, layoffs, and uncertainty at the platforms, news sites and publishers must all have a holistic on- and off-platform audience strategy. A website channel strategy is no longer enough.

What do we mean by caregiving? Childcare is part of it, though only some of the need we see among news organization employees including ourselves. We like the more expansive definition of caregiving laid out in a 2019 report from Harvard Business School, which defined it as “the act of providing unpaid assistance and support to family members or others who have physical, psychological, or developmental need.” In the same report, around three quarters of employees said they had some sort of caregiving responsibility.

In 2023 we will see family-related labor including eldercare not just made more visible, but more substantively recognized. Looking at where and how work gets done today, we see recent precedent for the types of change we’ll see. In a global survey of newsroom leaders from Oxford’s Reuters Institute this past autumn, nearly two in three said their organizations had embraced some level of hybrid and flexible work. Given the unpredictable nature of often-news- and deadline-driven work, hybrid work flexibility is a powerful way to support caregivers’ schedules.

Employers across industries know that more workplace transformation is needed. More than 40% of business leaders our research team at Charter surveyed this autumn said that they’re currently focused on solving for employee mental wellbeing, hiring, and employee retention. One way to begin addressing all three is by providing substantive caregiving support, including through leave policies, flexible time off,  and backup care benefits.

This is an area where media organizations can lead. While our organizations rarely offer the highest salaries, we can differentiate ourselves to candidates with family-inclusive benefits and practices. The economic strains on the industry aren’t a reason not to support caregivers better. Even (especially!) amid demanding assignments and a tight labor market, we can demonstrate that we can offer workers adequate time to rest and recharge, not to mention care for others. When these approaches are in place, we will see more engaged employees who are less likely to burn out. Support for caregiving isn’t a nice-to-have: it is an imperative for investing in and retaining diverse talent in journalism.

Even startup newsrooms can meet these needs when they prioritize them. Nonprofit newsrooms like The Markup and The 19th similarly show how they value their talent through policies that are generous to employees with child and eldercare responsibilities. When I (Cari) first joined Charter, I was seven months pregnant, and the company was new enough that our founders created our parental-leave policy the same day I received my offer. I was lucky to start my life as a caregiver with an organization that was ready to support me through the transition and into this next phase. But luck shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

A truly inclusive newsroom cannot exist without an understanding of what their caregivers need in order to do their jobs well. And what do we need?

• We need benefits that reflect the lived experiences of caregivers, such as childcare subsidies and mental health care — especially given the often unpredictable emotional and time constraints of newsroom work.
• We need employee resource groups that allow caregivers to connect and advocate for the necessary workplace supports.
• We need to feel empowered to be open about signing off to take a parent to the doctor or to make daycare pickup.
• We need networking to be family friendly: to happen during working hours, to be less dependent on alcohol-centered events, and to be open to participants within their households.
• We need organizations to designate backfills when staff are on extended leaves of absence, so that work doesn’t fall to already overburdened employees.
• We  need more of what Katherine Goldstein, a reporter who leads the DoubleShift community, calls “sustainable solutions to personal problems.”

Employers will come to understand that these are just a starting point. The news organizations that we’ll see thrive in the future will be the ones that continually ask their employees how they can support them, in and outside the newsroom.

Prediction markets have been around in one form or another for decades and have already made inroads into journalism during elections. 2023 will be the year they become a source for other types of stories, simply because there’s now too much activity in the crowd forecasting world to ignore. For almost any question you can think of, there are online crowds making predictions. And if journalists do think of a question that isn’t yet being forecasted, there are platforms where they can pose it themselves.

For example, here are a few forecasts available as of this writing that speak to Twitter’s future:

• Will Twitter go bankrupt in 2023? The forecasters at Good Judgment Open give it a 25% chance of happening.
• Will Trump tweet by the end of February? Good Judgment Open gives gives it a 41% chance.
• Will Twitter have an outage of six hours or more by mid-2023? Forecasters at Metaculus give it a 20% chance.

These figures are aggregations of lots of individual amateur predictions. Why trust them?

First, the theory: as the economists Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz explain, prediction markets work because they provide: “1) incentives to seek information; 2) incentives for truthful information revelation; and 3) an algorithm for aggregating diverse opinions.”

They also have a strong track record. Research has shown that prediction markets predict election results better than Gallup polls, for example. They’ve accurately predicted movies’ box office performances, matched the accuracy of professional economic forecasters, and even done a better job than analysts or oil markets in predicting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (“Prediction polls,” which also ask participants to make forecasts but don’t use a market, have a similarly strong track record.)

Prediction markets aren’t perfect. They’re only as good as the wisdom of their participants and the information those participants have access to. And, like any market, they can be vulnerable to manipulation without oversight.

Nonetheless, they’re a valuable tool for journalists and a complement to other sources. Reporters can use them the way financial journalists use other markets: They can be a source of news as well as one source among many explaining what’s going on.

The Economist has shown what this can look like by asking seasoned forecasters at Good Judgment Inc. to make predictions for its annual “The World Ahead” edition. The issue still includes the magazine’s traditional reporting as well as forecasts from the Economist Intelligence Unit, the company’s research arm, and predictions from big names in politics and business. The inclusion of Good Judgment’s “superforecasters” — who were selected based on their accuracy forecasting on open platforms — is an addition, not a substitute for traditional journalistic sources.

“The bigger picture here is that data-driven approaches are becoming popular in all kinds of journalism, and predictive/forward-looking journalism should follow suit,” said Tom Standage, a deputy editor at The Economist who edits The World Ahead. “That is why we partner with Good Judgment, and also why The Economist builds its own predictive models for elections, and why we often cite prediction markets too.”

Here’s a quick tour of the crowd forecasting landscape:

• There are real-money prediction markets like Kalshi, where traders bet on world events.
• There are play-money prediction markets like Manifold Markets that work the same way but without real cash at stake.
• There are platforms that use “prediction polls” rather than markets, like Good Judgment Open, INFER (where I’m a paid forecaster), Metaculus, and my prediction newsletter Nonrival.
• There are groups of forecasters who’ve consistently scored well on these platforms and now publish separately, like the Good Judgment “superforecasters”, the Swift Centre, and Samotsvety Forecasting.
• There’s even a search engine for forecasts called Metaforecast.

The big difference between these platforms and a publication like FiveThirtyEight, which also makes predictions and also has a strong track record, is that they depend on the collective judgment of their users rather than on statistical modeling. That allows them to make forecasts on topics where there’s less data — like the fate of Twitter.

Citing these platforms in stories is a good first step for journalists. The next step is for publications to ask their readers to participate. That’s what I’ve been doing with my newsletter: Each week I write about an economic or business story and ask readers to make a forecast. Over time readers see how their forecasts turn out, learn from each other, and hopefully improve their thinking. This process formalizes something most journalists already recognize: Your audience collectively knows much more than you do.

I predict that this year we’ll begin to see the emergence of a real and robust alternative to traditional corporate media in the form of highly engaging creator-driven independent media, and we’ll see rich and powerful people working aggressively to preserve their power in this new landscape.

This shift is evident when you look at the major news events this past year. The war in Ukraine was broadcast on TikTok. Millions of people followed the Depp v. Heard trial, or the FTX meltdown, solely through the lens of YouTubers, Twitter accounts, Substack writers, and podcast hosts. And it’s undeniable that Platformer, an independent news Substack founded by Casey Newton, has broken some of the most talked about and impactful coverage of Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Perhaps the most significant example of this fracturing in the media world is seen in coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. As thousands of people continue to die a week, millions become disabled by Long Covid, and our leaders leverage corporate media to normalize unprecedented mass death and disability, a whole new class of independent creators has captured audiences by producing essential public health journalism.

Death Panel, an independent podcast, hosted by the authors Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, provides a level of policy analysis almost wholly absent in traditional media. A myriad of independent Substack writers have pushed back on political leaders’ dominant narratives. And Peste Magazine, which produces deeply reported health journalism and commentary, continues to publish the sharpest writing on our current moment.

While there are many thoughtful and responsible creators who abide by journalistic principles, others will do or say anything to attract attention and make money. It’s easy for people who don’t know any better to be led down a rabbit hole by creators pushing conspiracy theories or hyper-politicized misinformation.

Still, young people are gravitating toward this new landscape. Feeling utterly unserved by traditional media, they are significantly more likely to seek out news on social media and to get that news from an online creator.

For everyone who wants to leverage this new, creator-driven media landscape to build a better world, there are as many who seek to use it to reinforce old systems of power. These people constantly attempt to politicize the shift in media consumption, saying that young people are rejecting traditional media for becoming too “woke.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The shift away from legacy media is a broad, technological shift, not a singularly ideological one.

It’s a shift that the political right is aggressively trying to capitalize on. Take Bari Weiss, for instance, a Substack commentator who recently took time away from doing comms work for Twitter to announce a new media venture.

Though Weiss continually positions herself as a “fiercely independent” journalist, she, like many right-wing content creators, is simply selling old, legacy power structures back to the public in new shiny packaging. It’s why members of the legacy media class are so quick to excitedly and uncritically promote her endeavors.

Weiss is not the only online creator masquerading as “anti-establishment” media while working tirelessly to serve the interests of the richest and most powerful. Chaya Raichik, the woman who runs Libs of TikTok, has had a longstanding financial relationship with Seth Dillon, owner of the right-wing media site The Babylon Bee. Right-wing influencer Glenn Greenwald, who once did journalism, now takes an “ample funding package” from Rumble, a far-right YouTube competitor backed by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Many legacy media journalists fall for these creators’ false positioning as outsiders because their view of the media world is so limited. They aren’t knowledgeable about the broader online creator landscape, and so they can’t properly contextualize people like Weiss, Raichik, and Greenwald. These creators are only known so well in traditional media because they remain tools of the establishment, backed by rich and powerful people who prop them up in order to retain their power and control in the new creator-driven landscape.

We are at an inflection point, and traditional media beginning to crumble provides a huge opportunity. We finally have the chance to build a more diverse and inclusive system that amplifies independent voices who are truly interested in holding power to account. To do that, we need to not only hold the platforms that incentivize outrage, harassment, and disinformation accountable, but we must also be sure not to replicate the flaws of traditional media in a new setting.

We cannot allow rich and powerful creators to disguise themselves as grassroots or to seize power online in order to promote extremist ideology. We must also encourage traditional media, which can still provide a crucial check on power, to learn, grow, and adapt to serve a broader, younger, more diverse audience.

Journalism today is still executed largely like the journalism of yesterday, from tone to format to process. News is defined by conflict, stories boiled down to two warring sides, presented by a distant, omniscient narrator in order of most important to least important information. The approach basically ends up telling readers: Everything sucks. Good luck to you.

It’s no wonder that news consumption is plummeting and users are left feeling confused or overwhelmed. There are better ways. I share two below from my experiences running Epicenter-NYC and URL Media — with a warning on why the problem stands to get even worse.

Who, what, when, where, why and one more question

You learned the five Ws in journalism school — the questions that every story must answer. At Epicenter-NYC, a newsletter launched to help New Yorkers get through the pandemic that has evolved into a multi-platform community media outlet, we ask one more of sources, whether they are in line at a food pantry or a multimillionaire entrepreneur on a panel: What do you need?

In turn, the stories we produce, whether in article or bullet form, a video or podcast or flyer, anticipate and preemptively address the concern of users and try to answer it: What can I do?

We don’t want you to feel helpless or depressed reading the news. These two fundamental tweaks to our reporting and editing process, searching for needs and offering actions, have made our work much more relevant, distinctive, personal and positive.

Stronger together

Journalists often compete with each other. But the last few years have seen a rise in cohorts, collaborations, and cooperation. Ever less-resourced newsrooms see the value of creating economies of scale. Already, there are many examples of this, including URL Media, the network we run of 16 high-performing Black and Brown media organizations. By sharing content, our newsrooms feel less small, sure, but we also embrace the overlaps of our audience. We know if you are a worker trying to navigate receiving unemployment benefits, you’re more likely to seek out multiple stories on the subject. In that particular scenario, after writing about the issue for each of their respective outlets, Epicenter-NYC’s reporter Andrea Pineda Salgado teamed up with Documented’s Rommel H. Ojeda to write a story based on workers’ WhatsApp messages to the latter. The collaboration was not rooted in anyone telling them to join forces but rather in the belief that their audiences could benefit from the others’ expertise, platform and distribution.

Our outlets are focused on service to our communities. And so collaboration feels less contrived than necessary. In the process of uplifting our audiences, we are uplifting each other. We feel so strongly about this that we built that mission into our name: URL stands for Uplift, Respect and Love. These actions inform every aspect of our company, and we believe they also send a signal to users on the role we hope to play in each other’s lives.

Going digital is not enough

The pace of change is faster than we can keep up with. I could have had a bot write this prediction (my lazy friend Bill Grueskin beat me to it). In the midst of AI, metaverses and 1,427 platforms claiming to be the next Twitter, legacy newsrooms are still trying to get staff to embrace being “digital first.” Mainstream media are ill prepared for what’s to come. I’ve staked my future on this: The sincere commitment to serve direct, defined audiences and the convening power of multi-platform networks acknowledging overlapping communities in order to achieve scale might give us at least a fighting chance.

As independent local news outlets continue to struggle, not only will the scale and scope of these networks rise to fill the vacuum and take advantage of the inherent trust readers have in local news, but they’re likely to embrace the “surround sound” approach. Networks with aligned interests will boost each other’s narratives in a coordinated fashion to inundate readers with the same message from different places.

In some cases, different networks will be funded by the same sources who are building out their own vision of local news. In some cases, different partisan networks will collaborate with the same advocacy groups and cite the same research — which might also be funded by the same sources as the news networks. Different spins on the same story can also be published simultaneously on different websites across the networks, all the while citing and promoting aligned sites and networks.

The rationale behind this strategy is simple: Provide more credibility to these networks and the sites within these networks, while also ensuring these efforts are more influential. After all, the odds of a message cutting through to readers — and perhaps even to the traditional press — increase if it comes from multiple places as opposed to a single story in a single relatively unknown local news site.

In the run-up to the 2024 general election, more such networks will emerge, and adopting the “surround sound” tactic will become standard practice. Independent local media — already playing second fiddle to partisan local press in some state — will face the challenging task of ensuring its readers can distinguish between political campaigning and good old-fashioned news.

Powerful large language models like GPT-3 promise to give reporters the ability to partially automate the task of writing articles, while generative image models like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion could deliver custom stock photos to newsrooms that cannot afford subscriptions to photo services. And of course, the latest automatic speech recognition models will allow reporters to easily and accurately transcribe their interviews for free.

Many journalists already upload their interviews to paid auto-transcription services like Otter and Trint, which rely on machine learning models to quickly produce fairly accurate transcriptions. The Whisper model, released by artificial intelligence company OpenAI in September, has some real advantages over the current services. It’s more accurate, doesn’t require an internet connection, and is completely free. But it’s also relatively slow, cannot distinguish between speakers, and requires a lot of technical know-how to set up. (Stage Whisper should at least solve that last issue.)

Even more promising are generative image models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. These tools have allowed users to generate realistic images based solely on text prompts. Some technology-focused reporters have already begun using AI-generated images to illustrate their stories, more as a gimmick than anything else. But as these technologies continue to improve and enter the mainstream, they are likely to reshape newsroom debates over photo manipulation, photo illustrations, and misleading stock photos.

What about the dream (or nightmare) of an artificial intelligence that can write news articles? Wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters have previously experimented with automatic article-writing tools that can produce schematic news stories based on numerical data like earnings reports or sports scores. But the latest large language models can go well beyond that.

Large language models, such as GPT-3, have the potential to disrupt newsrooms by enabling journalists to use AI to write their stories. With these models, journalists can input a few key points and the AI can generate a complete article, saving time and potentially improving the quality of the writing. However, this raises ethical questions around authorship and plagiarism. If a journalist relies too heavily on AI to write their stories, who can be credited as the author? Additionally, there is the potential for the AI to inadvertently plagiarize other sources, raising questions about journalistic integrity and accuracy.

Another potential risk of relying on large language models to write news articles is the potential for the AI to insert fake quotes. Since the AI is not bound by the same ethical standards as a human journalist, it may include quotes from sources that do not actually exist, or even attribute fake quotes to real people. This could lead to false or misleading reporting, which could damage the credibility of the news organization. It will be important for journalists and newsrooms to carefully fact check any articles written with the help of AI, to ensure the accuracy and integrity of their reporting. [/END]

The previous two paragraphs were produced by ChatGPT, a OpenAI tool that allows users to interact with GPT-3, a large language model that responds to user’s prompts. ChatGPT can already produce fabricated news stories that sound remarkably real, complete with fake quotes. Given the proper inputs (accurate information, real quotes from sources), there’s no reason that the model and its successors couldn’t produce true and accurate news stories too.

AI-based tools will never replace human journalists. But much like previous technological advancements, these tools could change how reporters do their jobs — freeing them up to spend more time interviewing sources and digging up information and less time transcribing interviews and writing daily stories on deadline.

As these tools enter newsrooms, they will spark new questions about journalistic ethics: Is it wrong to train a generative AI model on thousands of artists’ images without their consent? Is it misleading to publish an image of something that does not actually exist or an event that never actually occurred? If a reporter uses a large language model to write an article, should that be considered plagiarism or even fabulism?

Let 2023 be the year we start figuring out some of the answers.

Here, I’ll pause for anyone who’s ever run a news business to stop laugh-crying.

It’s tempting to think that the growth path for an independent news organization is consistent and linear. But after analyzing nearly 150 organizations over the last two years through LION Publishers’ Sustainability Audit process, we’ve seen this kind of “if/then” thinking doesn’t apply to the relative Wild West that is the independent news landscape. In this equal-parts-challenging-and-promising ecosystem, traditional markers of growth like age, budget, and size don’t directly correlate to sustainability, which we define as the union of financial health, operational resilience and journalistic impact.

Here, the individual (dare we say, “unique”) nature of each organization requires a more flexible maturity model — one that makes space for crucial differences in how they launched, the circumstances under which they’re growing and what they’re aiming to achieve.

That’s why we’ve developed a new maturity model to capture a news business’s potential growth path. Our hypothesis is that independent news organizations progress to sustainability through a set of stages that they navigate at their own pace, within their own context and with their own goals in mind.

This model accommodates the fact that a publication could be in the “maintaining” stage for decades — or a few months. It could be “building” with a 20-person staff, or “poised for growth” with a team of two. A news business might skip the “Scaling” stage because it has reached sustainability without significantly expanding, or it might fall back to “Maintaining” as it rightsizes after a period of growth. At the heart of our hypothesis is this: How a news business compares to others matters much less than how successfully it meets its own goals.

The Stages of Sustainability are:

• Ideation: Developing a concept for a news business.
• Preparation: Beginning to implement a minimum viable product.
• Building: Iterating products based on audience and market research while building a foundation for the supporting revenue and operations.
• Maintaining: Increasing journalistic impact and audience growth while still seeking operational and financial stability.
• Poised for growth: Preparing for a growth catalyst while products, revenue, and operations are stable.
• Growing: Steadily and simultaneously growing revenue, audience, and operations.
• Scaling: Building a considerably more robust operational structure to support significant new revenue streams, audiences or products.
• Sustaining: Achieving significant journalistic impact with mature products supported by a strong operational foundation and multiple stable revenue streams.

Though we’re still in the process of testing this hypothesis, we’ve already seen some compelling evidence that growth does not equate with sustainability. Consider the 38% of news businesses who self-identified as being in the “maintaining” stage:

• Nearly half have launched since 2020 but the rest vary greatly in age, with founding dates in nearly every decade since the ’70s.
• They ranged in staff size from no full-timers to 12 employees
• Their gross annual revenue varied from $4,000 to $1.2 million
• More than half launched with less than $10,000 in funding, while some launched with up to $300,000.

We’re kicking off 2023 by crunching the data gathered from the Sustainability Audits we’ve conducted over the past two years, and will conduct an additional 300 over the next three years. By testing and iterating on our model and more deeply incorporating it into our offerings, we predict that independent news businesses will finally have a clear roadmap for where they’ve been, where they are, and where they want to go.