A new research report from a combined effort of Financial Times Strategies and the Knight Journalism Lab at Northwestern University is now out. Entitled “Next Gen News” it describes a very different future for the way news is gathered, packaged, and consumed. And if I haven’t grabbed you in the seconds it took to read my lede, then too bad and so sad for me.
The report is the second such effort from this collaboration and uses online surveys of 1,000 subjects in each of five countries: Brazil, India, Nigeria, the UK and the US. They also took more in-depth interviews of 84 random subjects aged 18-28, and 19 news producers across the world drawn from both solo creators and larger news sites. The 80-page report is well worth your time, and shows what is happening in the world of news. Some of it is obvious, but a lot of it isn’t, and the insights will surprise you.
If you have never heard of Lisa Remillard, The Pudding, Morning Brew or Climate Adam, then you need to pay a lot more attention to this report and the market that they represent. News sites are embracing novel ways to attract, orient and engage readers. Sites are tailoring their content to produce a mix of sources, notifications, story types and ways to adjust their algorithms to provide the best engagement. That much you probably know, but there are many tips and tricks on how to get from the old news world to the modern era.
To that end, they identify seven different modes of engagement, as shown in the diagram below.
For example, the sifters can scroll through a list of news items. They have about two seconds for video and maybe 15 or so seconds for reviewing the text to select the stories or topics that breakthrough. Seekers use overall websites to guide their discovery process. Each of the seven modes is explored in detail, with numerous examples from sample websites from the five countries.
One of the interesting things is how different the news environment is across the world. Nigeria, for example, is the most digitally engaged country, for example. The study’s authors explain why they picked the places they did, and document who they did additional interviews at length.
The challenge for modern news producers is that there is a broader definition of what news is for modern readers. It can contain civic info, but it also has a personal impact on the reader and is both entertaining and non-fiction. The researchers found that the best producers have turned the trad journalism model on its head: they start from being distributors, master the language and style of their platforms and design their content so it can travel across their own news ecosystem. Being distribution first means that engagement isn’t just a by-product of solid journalism but built-in up front. Publishing is the start of a conversation between the site creators and readers, not the endpoint of what was once the legacy process. The old news style began with an idea and then worked through research and writing the story and ended with distribution. The modern workflow starts with distribution and then tests several ideas before moving into editing and publication, all in the service of community engagement.
No longer are news producers trying to shoehorn content into a distribution platform (like TikTok or YouTube), with results measured in page views or likes. Instead, the content is designed to be native to a platform in terms of style, focus, and news content. And forget about the inverted pyramid scheme for writing stories: there are numerous examples of what next-gen news uses, such as building recurring inside jokes to make complex topics more approachable.
This means that the modern newsroom is filled with what the researchers call “full stack creators.” This doesn’t mean that they know everything from HTML to Cursor, but that they have a mix of skills including on-camera presence, visual storytelling, script writing, being able to package the product with descriptions and thumbnails, and understanding the basic analytics that will be used in their stories. That is a tall order. But wait, there is more: the modern newsroom needs to be a working, cross-functional pod that can cover multiple platforms too.
Back when Twitter was still a trusted breaking news source, we had to learn the ins and outs of socializing our content. And to some extent, this is still the case, just now the socializers are just one of the seven modes mentioned earlier. But now the producer has to start with the assumption that they have to build content that people actually want to share with their peers, and understand how different platforms distribute their shared content. To be effective, this content has to resonate emotionally, be simple to grasp, and easy to report. Seems obvious, right?
Not mentioned in the report is that content creators have to navigate the dangerous waters of AI and understand that traditional SEO and being an “influencer” are both dead concepts. Cybersecurity expert Daniel Miessler recently posted that “The main viable path for knowledge worker professionals is to start seeing themselves as free agents. And to start behaving that way in terms of how they present to the world. It’s about to be essential that you’re visible, that you have a portfolio of work you can show/talk about, that you have a domain. A website.” Everyone will be an influencer, and its our job as scribes to find, target, and feed our particular audiences.
Meet Denver Brady, avowed serial killer and author of a book with the same title as this novel. His work forms the book-within-a-book, more of a step-by-step instruction on how to off someone and escape to do it again and again. The book is found in the novel’s primary murder victim’s hands at the start of the novel, which begins the manhunt by inspector Samantha Hansen, who is coming off compassionate leave and back on the force. Sam, as she likes to be called, is beset with loads of problems, both emotional and physical, and has trouble concentrating on clues that should be obvious to her (maybe not for all readers however) as she tries to solve the novel’s murder. She reads along the how-to book and tries to align the clues in the book with the ones she uncovers during the course of her investigation. The novel mostly takes place in and around London, and has loads of plot twists and turns, right up to its very end. I won’t give away any of these because they are deliciously put together. Many murder mysteries run out of gas towards the end but this book — or should I say the combined books — holds your attention until nearly the last page. I highly recommend this novel by Rebecca Philipson.
Some wags (including Marc Benioff) have called Copilot Clippy 2.0. I don’t think that is a fair fight. We should at least bump up the version to 10.0. In many respects, Clippy was ahead of its time (
An old wax cylinder was discovered in a New Orleans attic containing a recording of a an century-old jazz pioneer. The cylinder ends up missing at the same time as an arsonist burns down the home it was last seen. The mystery widens to some unsavory characters and some interesting plot twists that weave various real locations around town, so those readers familiar with the city might enjoy the travel scenes. The double murder/arson investigation — a dead body is discovered in the burnt-out home that has been there for decades — proceeds in fits and starts, and with just the right mix of action, dialogue and suspense. I thought some of the plot points could have been described more sharply, but would recommend this mystery nonetheless. 
The title characters of 
Eric O’Neill has had an interesting career hunting down some of the worst spies and cybercriminals (he was one of the principals behind the takedown of Robert Hanssen). 
