From a story on theonion.com headlined “Reporter Who Found 3 Angry Tweets About Issue Guesses That’s An Article Right There”:

Shrugging as he started writing the story’s lede, New York Times employee Lance Reede, a reporter who found three angry tweets about a particular issue, revealed that he figured that’s probably an article right there.

“Yeah, sure—you’ve got a few angry people on social media, you put all their words together on one page, and, boom, there’s your news article,” said Reede, explaining how embedding the three posts under a single headline suggesting that “social media wasn’t having it,” might even be enough to stretch the article to 800 words.

From a story in the Toronto Star by Jeremy Nuttall headlined “A journalist explains why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine saw him put down his camera—and pick up a Kalashnikov”:

The static of radio communications intrudes into the conversation as Sergei Loiko, speaking from a basement surrounded by Ukrainian fighters on the outskirts of Kyiv, explains how he went from reporter to territorial defence fighter.

For about 25 years, Loiko covered conflict and life in Russia for the Los Angeles Times as an award-winning photojournalist and reporter until his retirement in 2015, after which he wrote novels.

From a story on johnemcintyre.blogspot.com by John McIntyre headlined “Call the pressroom”:

You’ve seen it. A reporter dashes in to a busy newsroom with a hot scoop, and a crusty old editor picks up a phone, usually a candlestick, and barks into it, “Stop the presses!”

I’ve had occasion, often on a night when the Orioles were in extra innings, to call the pressroom about slowing or pausing the run to get the game score into a few thousand copies. (Really, nighttime baseball is unnatural.) But in forty years in the paragraph game I’ve only heard “Stop the presses” twice.

From a story on cjr.org by Paroma Soni headlined “Houston will get a $20m startup newsroom”:

A GROUP OF PHILANTHROPIES is launching an independent nonprofit news organization in Houston with initial funding of more than $20 million, marking one of the biggest investments into local news in recent years.

The investments—$7.5 million each from the Houston Endowment and the Kinder Foundation, $4 million from Arnold Ventures, $1.5 million from the American Journalism Project, and $250,000 from the Knight Foundation––are for an initial period of three years.

From a story on niemanlab.org by Anita Zielina headlined “Can U.S. journalism truly serve global audiences? Not if it treats them like an afterthought”:

2022 started off with some high-profile movement in the media entrepreneurship space, when Ben Smith, the media columnist for The New York Times and former editor of BuzzFeed News, announced he was leaving the Times to start a news organization with Justin Smith, who also announced that he was stepping down as the CEO of Bloomberg Media.

From a Committee to Protect Journalists report by Leonard Downie Jr. headlined “‘Night and day’: The Biden administration and the press”:

The first year of the Biden administration’s relationship with the U.S. press has been an almost complete reversal of the Trump administration’s unprecedentedly pervasive and damaging hostility, which seriously damaged the news media’s credibility and often spread misinformation around the world.

In marked contrast, President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, and administration officials have repeatedly stressed the importance of working with the news media to keep Americans informed. Reporters still have had issues with access to the president and some administration officials and information. But there have not been any vicious attacks on journalists as enemies of the people or accusations of “fake news.”

From a story on cjr.org by Erin Carroll headlined “Obstruction of Journalism: A new way to combat violence against journalists”:

Two days before Christmas in 2020, the Fallen Journalists Memorial Act was signed into law. The act authorizes a monument in the District of Columbia to commemorate “America’s commitment to a free press” and honor “journalists who sacrificed their lives in service to that cause.”

Part of the impetus for the law was the 2018 mass shooting at the Annapolis Capital Gazette. And in the months leading up to the passage of the act, images of journalists being beaten and bloodied went from surreal to near-routine. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented 593 assaults against journalists in 2020–nearly a 1,400 percent increase over the year before.

From a New York Times Insider column by Katie Van Syckle headlined “Finding a Story by Asking ‘Really Dumb Questions'”:

As the international climate correspondent for The Times, Somini Sengupta covers the human toll of climate change, particularly the impact on vulnerable populations.

Ms. Sengupta was born in Kolkata, India, the city formerly known as Calcutta. When she was 8 years old, her family moved to a small village on the Canadian prairie and later to a suburb of Los Angeles. Moving taught her to adapt, she said, “to be like water, as Bruce Lee would put it.”

From a story on niemanlab.org by Caitlin Petre headlined “‘Traffic whoring’ or simply optimizing? Finding the boundaries between clean and dirty metrics”:

In late January 2012, A. J. Daulerio, then the editor in chief of Gawker.com, published a post on the site announcing an experiment. Every day for the next two weeks, he explained, a different Gawker editorial staffer would be assigned to “traffic-whoring duty,” and their sole task would be to publish whatever posts they thought would earn the most unique visitors. Daulerio laid out a few ground rules for “traffic-whoring days:” Photo galleries were prohibited, as were pornographic and racist posts. Other than these basic parameters, the writer assigned to traffic-whoring was “free to add things to the site they presume will make the little Chartbeat meter freak out.” Daulerio proffered a few suggestions of such topics, the tamer of which included “dancing cat videos,” “Burger King bathroom fights,” and “sexy celeb beach bods.”

From NiemanLab’s Predictions for Journalism: “What the next generation of journalists thinks” by Robert Hernandez”

This past semester, I taught my JOUR 323: Journalism and The Audience class at USC Annenberg. The user-focused course is mostly seniors with a few juniors, all of whom strategically launch a semester-long product to serve a particular audience or demographic.

As part of the class, we read and discussed one of last year’s Nieman Lab predictions each week.

It seems fitting that this year I turn my prediction over to them. Here’s what a few soon-to-be-graduating journalists predict will happen in the coming year.