We Won’t Get To Next
Over the past five years, How We Get To Next has interrogated the future, because the future matters now. Unfortunately, Next itself won’t be there to see what happens in the coming years — it will be ceasing publication as of today.
At a moment when commercial media ventures of all sizes are shuttering, times are even tougher for nonprofit publications like ours. We’re extremely grateful to the organizations that have funded our work for the past five years — especially the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — but all good things must, inevitably, come to an end.
We’d like to thank all of our former editors, in various positions over the years, for making Next what it was: Alice Bell, Abigail Ronck, Duncan Geere, Kristen Taylor, Molly McArdle, Gabe Stein, and Susannah Kemple. We’ve also had the privilege of working alongside guest editors on various collections and series: Ken Banks, Florence Okoye, Alicia Kennedy, and Kenny Fries. Special thanks, too, to Eden Brackenbury for her wonderful art and art direction over the last two years.
And, of course, there’s Steven Johnson — without his book How We Got to Now, none of this would have happened at all — as well as Jane Root and the team at Nutopia, who adapted it for TV. We’d also like to thank Emily Bromfield, Matt Locke, Hugh Garry, and Anjali Ramachandran from our publisher, Storythings. They’ll continue to explore other projects in this space, including the launch of a new podcast network for public impact stories in the next month. (If you’re interested in finding out more, get in touch!)
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be migrating everything off of Medium and onto our own independent site, where it shall live in (we hope) perpetuity. Nearly everything we’ve ever published was done so under a Creative Commons license, and those licenses will remain in place, meaning that our work is free to take, share, and build upon.
All the best,
