Assignment: Guardian

I asked our entrepreneurial journalism students at CUNY to read statements by four of the candidates for its editorship — and then to write their own.
Here are edited excerpts.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: I would like my appointment as The Guardian’s first black editor to reinvent the organization and give it a truly international character. As a child growing up in Zimbabwe, my first interactions with the paper were as a schoolboy. One of my friends had an uncle who worked in “the yards” north of Harare, a place of walled estates topped with sharp razor blade wire. Armed guards. Surveillance cameras.

We got “thrown-away” copies of The Guardian. For me the news was never old but gave me access to different worlds. It was how I got so fascinated with the world of media; especially its role to inform. It empowered me with the capacity to approach the world with wonder and ambition. As editor in chief I will be a front-line combatant in the news media’s battle to remain the bedrock of an informed world.

There is a remarkable structural shift happening in the world too, propelled by economic and technological progress. There is more connectivity and greater variety of voices in the global conversation. As a media organization we are playing our part. While we have been expanding our global reach with the introduction of Guardian USA and Guardian Australia in recent years I will introduce Guardian Africa.

We must create a hybrid newsroom that will do away with the prevailing silo’d way of doing things and adopt a cross functional approach that will allow our journalism to become much more competitive. And that is not to mean we must be just after traffic or clicks. The Guardian is known for quality journalism and it is something we will uphold while being competitive in the digital age.

Our mission should always be to get it right. We must be vigilant with our journalism by avoiding mistakes and misjudgments because we simply want to be first. Historically, The Guardian has always stood for quality not quantity and that will remain the basis of our journalism. Of course, it is a priority need that our editors and reporters to have a strong appreciation of how to make sense of information for digital consumption.

No doubt the future looks digital, but there is still an audience for print. We have a loyal print readership that we cannot ignore and we just have to find creative ways of retaining them. I have no doubt that digital is where our future growth will come from. So it will be a balancing act between both digital platforms and print.

Having a diverse newsroom is critical. We live in a world in which those who before had no voice or lacked representation can speak for themselves via social media. We do not want to be found wanting. Diversity enriches the news experience. Currently The Guardian does not have enough writers from ethnic minority backgrounds, whether on staff or as contributors. In terms of recruitment, The Guardian’s percentage of staff from an ethnic minority background is at around 11%. For anyone who leads editorial there is an obligation to diversify. But it is not just about adding color or affirmative action. It’s about creating an environment that encourages editors and reporters to have frank conversations, grapple with unexamined prejudices, and freely engage with sensitive subjects. We learn from those whose experiences, beliefs, and perspectives are different from our own.

Change is scary but inevitable. Alan Rusbridger is a wonderful personality and has been a great steward for our newsroom bringing in some of the best talent to help us adjust to the ongoing disruptions. He is leaving us a legacy to build on. Here is to an exciting future for The Guardian.

Kristen Clark: As Editor-in-Chief I will work to crystallize an organizational structure committed to innovation. I’ll create dedicated channels to surface new voices and ideas from within our ranks — allocating funding for calculated risks. This strategy will make use of one of our key resources: a staff of journalists that understands the needs and values of the organization, and who joined us out of inborn desire to do meaningful work.

The Guardian has always taken the long-view of journalism, and in this case that means cultivating a tolerance and even expectation for a high-rate of failure. We are not beholden to stockholders to return quarterly profits, meaning we are in a unique position to steer our work directly to the cutting edge of journalism’s future.

Furthermore, in a time when ads no longer offer a sustainable source of revenue on their own, we have a unique opportunity to experiment with revenue streams that are in particular alignment with our editorial goals. Recent years have seen The Guardian move beyond traditional news products and into the realm of news games, professional networking tools, live events, educational workshops, and a full-fledged Masters program in journalism in partnership with the University of Cardiff — all of which are potentially viable revenue streams.

I no longer see the need to keep the commercial side of our business walled off from the editorial side. Rather, I’d like to invite those in our company responsible for The Guardian’s fiscal future into direct, meaningful collaboration with editorial. By cultivating a culture in which the commercial side of our enterprise understands, believes in, and fights for our journalistic values, we will open the door to finding new ways of making those values profitable.

In the last few years, the world has seen us harness the power of our readership in truly groundbreaking collaborations. From unearthing MP’s expenses, to crowdsourcing videos of police abuse, to spearheading a crowd-investigation of a toxic waste dump in the Ivory Coast, our readers have a demonstrated commitment to performing their own acts of journalism. For our next step, I’d like to see initiatives that extend that work beyond those isolated calls to action, allowing journalist-reader collaborations to truly become woven into the fabric of our everyday reporting. I want to create spaces in which readers have a voice at the very inception of a story, and in which we stay with them in continuous dialogue on through to the last graph we write on the topic, years later.

In this way, we will capitalize on the wisdom and curiosity of our diverse and knowledgeable readership—drawing from them inspiration, new perspectives, and specialized skills. Partnering with our readership offers another long-term benefit as well: By including readers in our reporting process, we will provoke more open discussions about the craft, values and ethical standards of journalism as we see them here at The Guardian— resulting in a readership that better understands and is even more invested in the practices that result in high-quality journalism.

Finally, with 70 percent of our readership living outside of the UK, it is imperative that our voice and editorial choices resonate in an increasingly globalized and internationalized world. Collaborations with readers abroad will allow us to stay in closer touch with the needs and interests of our international audience.

We have already begun to see media organizations move beyond Internet 1.0 metrics like page views and “likes” and into more meaningful measurements of engagement. In this future landscape, the key to our success will be differentiation. In this regard, some markers of the future of journalism can be found within the walls of this organization. We have already positioned The Guardian as a leader in data-driven and international reporting, for instance, as well as a trusted ally for whistleblowers looking to expose matters of great public interest.

Recognizing the lines of inquiry that create the most meaning and engagement for our readers will help us move beyond the knee-jerk need to publish half a dozen stories about a white and gold dress — and allow us to concentrate our efforts on the work that has set us apart a distinct independent voice for nearly two centuries.

Sneha Inguva: After having launched a fairly unsuccessful alpha product in the media space, I’ve come to a conclusion: There are the products that engineers love to build and journalists love to tout … and then there are the products that people actually use. There is a reason that Buzzfeed has 80 million monthly active users while the New York Times has only 1.6 million. Some may decry this as the degradation of quality of journalism, claiming that cat videos and click-bait have replaced high-quality content. But let’s not forget that David Carr himself staunchly defended Buzzfeed from its critics.

And for the Guardian to survive in this new age of media, I think it needs to consider what people really want. I’m not suggesting that it morph into Upworthy. I am merely stating that it take some lessons from these millenial-focused publications, some lessons from wildly popular Silicon Valley startups, and incorporate both into its existing model of transparent, deep-diving journalism.

To that end, I propose that instead of merely having reporters, technologists, graphic designers, and community managers working within their own groups, the Guardian should build mini-teams, consisting of one of each. Each mini-team can be assigned a theme or general topic area and be given a fair amount of independence to pursue a story (with editors having reasonable oversight, of course). I think the mini-teams can work to produce a variety of content, whether it be breaking news or long-form pieces that take weeks to pull together. Every story exists beyond the mere text, after all. We have to consider how it resonates with its audience. How can it be visually represented? How it can be interactive; not just a static display of facts? It may even be interesting to track the growth of a story; can crowd-sourced information be incorporated into a story in a meaningful way?

Kate Albright-Hanna: When historians look back upon our era, they will talk about it as a period of crisis for working people, for democracy — and for journalism. We’ve been here before. In fact, these are the conditions that gave birth to the Guardian. As the worldwide calls for reform grow louder, at the very moment that other journalistic institutions struggle to survive, we are in a position to step up and lead in a time of confusion and transition.

We live in a gilded era of growing monopolistic power — characterized by consolidation, centralization and the corporatization of the even the most private corners of our lives. Regular people feel powerless and desperately need a champion — an independent organization that will question power, pursue truth and explain relationships and dynamics that are deliberately opaque.

Our independence is our advantage — and we should do everything we can to guard it and ensure its sustainability, including:

1. Build our membership program. In the mid-century, journalism stood apart from the people, claiming the mantel of “objectivity” while being sustained by advertising revenue. We didn’t have to advocate for ourselves or convince people that journalism was necessary for freedom and a healthy democracy.

We just had to sell ads. That model is broken, but we are now in a position to build a new model that doesn’t depend on corporate partnerships or empty clickbait. If we honestly and openly reach out to our audience and ask them to be more than an audience — to actually join our team, to share our mission, and to fight back against corruption and unchecked power with us — then we will build a sustainable global institution capable of fulfilling its true journalistic mission.

2. Information asymmetry is one of the advantages government and corporate insiders use to consolidate power, and the Guardian’s role is to level the playing field by giving information — actionable information — to its readers.

That means that the Guardian should build a suite of tools that empower its readers to engage with its content — and create communities around it. It’s not enough for a reporter to cover, for example, a story about a toxic site in a neighborhood that is being covered up by the local representative. The Guardian should also provide tech tools that allow people to reach out to their representatives, and organize their communities in response to the content.

3. At this moment, the Internet is at a sort of tipping point — it could become a tool of oppression wielded by centralized governments and multinational corporations — or it could become a tool of liberation for individuals, small communities, grassroots organizations and journalists. The Guardian’s mission requires it to stay several steps ahead of the powerful institutions that would wield technology as a tool to obfuscate, spy and oppress. That means that the Guardian must foster a digital culture that not only deploys the smartest platforms, tools and data journalism — but it must also fight for Internet freedom in the courts, in Parliament, in trade agreements—anywhere that this basic freedom and threat to its mission is threatened in the world.

Ana Ormaechea: The Guardian has already made a strong, solid place for itself in the digital and multimedia ecosystem. Now it is time to move forward to a risky but potentially rewarding strategy: change our relationship with our users.

For several years, we’ve known where our readers were, how they were reading, or when they were catching up on our articles. Today, our users’ attitude has changed. They are no longer only readers, but also listeners and viewers of our articles; they access the information on a smartphone, a tablet, a smart TV, paper, Facebook or Twitter; they reach us from their beds, their cars, on the subway, at work.

Not only the consumption of the content but also our users’ attitude toward it has changed completely. We need to change our relationship with them, be closer to them. I see some key points on which we can build this new relationship:

Be real Hacks & Hackers: Our readers, listeners and viewers are now surrounded by an amazing ecosystem of interactive products. We need to be able to build stories in attractive new formats that engage with users, and the only way to build these new products is through a real collaboration between journalists and developers, working together on small new projects and services we can offer our users.

Different distribution platforms, different voices: A large number of our users now come through social media. We are aware of this and paying attention to our distribution on social media platforms, but we must develop different voices for each network, adapting the tone of our content to every ecosystem in which we’re distributing this content. We must seek an intimacy with them like the one podcasts achieve with the listeners. We must find that proximity by adapting our voice to every platform.

Different platforms, different business models: We need to keep in mind the attitude of the users consuming our content, and think about whether they are reading us on the go, on a small phone and so in a low lean-forward position; whether they’re leaning back on a couch with a tablet, reading the news in a receptive position, and therefore with a much more open attitude toward purchasing advertised products; if they are listening to our podcasts in a car, where they can received geolocated coupons. We need to think about every attitude of users consuming our content, and build a specific revenue model to fit each of these consumer attitudes.

Closer relationships with our users ... and getting new users: We’ve done a fast and effective international expansion, with US and Australian editions, but we need to keep our content open to big communities inside this new international ecosystem. Millennials are an important target we should think about. We need to be present in the platforms on which they spend all their time, like WhatsApp in Europe or Snapchat in USA.

Kim Choe: I have never been a loyal Guardian reader. I only visit the website to read specific stories to which I am referred — usually by social media — and rarely stay. I know the organization is consistently producing engaging interactive content and a wide variety of high-quality video, but that’s not immediately obvious when you visit the site.

The Guardian’s focus, rightly, remains on text-driven content. But there are invariably times where this isn’t the most effective way to reach the audience. I would be interested in a “Guardian Visual” app or microsite, where the best of this content is curated in its own space, rather than being buried near the bottom of the homepage or tucked away in a tab on the current app. Increasing the value of this content produces better advertising opportunities.

In his candidate statement, Wolfgang Blau says 70 percent of the Guardian’s readers are outside the United Kingdom. So why is there no global edition of the website? The three current editions do a good job of speaking to their respective markets — but not to me, a New Zealander interested in a truly international approach to my news.

Having localized editions makes more sense from an advertising point of view — but reports suggest that is not yet paying dividends, so maybe a purely global edition would help drive greater across-the-board engagement.

Núria Saldanha: The relationship in which journalists decide what are their audience needs and desires doesn’t work anymore. We have to embrace a horizontal relationship with our public and build channels of conversation. Journalism nowadays is much more about listening to and serving audiences than deciding themes and producing content for them. The new generation of news consumers wants to be heard, and listening to a diversity of voices can enrich the content produced.

Leandro Beguoci: There is no doubt that The Guardian is a restless and vibrant organization. The Guardian has been feeding the journalism machine with serious and relevant buzz for years in a lot of different ways. It does not fear technology and experimentation. News organizations are not known by its ability in innovating. The Guardian is.

The future of journalism is hybrid. It is no longer pure content. It is like a cyborg, performing activities which were impossible to imagine some years ago. The Guardian has embraced the cyborg. But the Guardian cyborg has so many arms and functions that it is no longer functional. It looks like old dumb phones with a lot of features which no one knew, back in 2004, how to use.

As a The Guardian reader, I received the football newsletter and the social issues newsletter. I left London in 2010, but I am still a fan on how The Guardian reports and how it engages communities. But, I must confess, they sound like products made by different companies. The social issues newsletter is clear and powerful on engaging the community, in providing relevant services, in raising concern. It is pure advocacy. The football newsletter is an amazing piece on entertainment.

The Guardian does not need to be a single cyborg. As the time passes, it is getting clear that we do not need a single Guardian. We need Guardians in different areas, with a clear vision governing different products. We need different Guardian cyborgs for different purposes, organized under a singular position in the world. The reason is simple. It is easier to have a single vision across different products than trying to gather so many products under the same organization. It is impossible for the Guardian to occupy so many spaces with a single brand and product. It is dysfunctional.

For such reason, Guardian needs to embrace the Guardianness. Technology, design, and journalism meets in the same place to create products to serve different communities. It is an army of cyborg Guardians for communities. This is Guardianness.

The Guardian can have a huge presence in academia, imagining solutions for real life problems. The Guardian can create great content for football, partnering with football teams to create better experiences for supporters. The Guardian can also have a huge presence in covering power and world politics, working together with organizations all over the world and being funded by individuals and other foundations.

All of such products can occupy a singular position in the market. The Guardian can be a pioneer of new job description for journalism. Imagine a journalist who is defined as a senior health community organizer. Such people have the role of producing content for serving people who are hard users of the National Health System in UK and engaging with them to improve the whole system. Journalists like them are not only writers or videomakers. Content is the starter, but the service is only fully delivered when a solution for a given problems arrives. The Guardian is very well positioned to have journalist who are advocates, community organizers, researchers, service providers.

For every single The Guardian cyborg, the mother company can have a revenue stream. It can count on subscription for its entertainment services. It can raise money from universities for the research chapter. It can count on a monthly subscription from the people they are helping. Imploding the newspaper model is good for The Guardian mission and for its budget.

Hence, The Guardian is no longer in the attention game nor in click bait competition. The Guardian is in the utility game. Once it becomes necessary for people to make meaning of their daily life and improve the way they live, work, educate, and have fun, The Guardian can occupy a very singular space on media landscape.

Chad O’Carroll: As paper subscriptions continue to dwindle and the outlook for our print title becomes increasingly uncertain, it is time for us to accept the hard reality that unlimited, free content is not a viable strategy for the long-term. As a paper with an excellent reputation among its readers, I propose that we introduce a porous paywall and charge users a modest access fee of $9.99 per month for more than 20 articles per month. But this will be no simple subscription, we will treat our subscribers as members of our community, people who will receive invitations to special events, get the opportunity to directly interact with our journalists and editors, and share their opinion on the future of our coverage.

For too long Google has monopolized the advertising industry and unfairly shared revenue with publishers like the Guardian. Despite millions of hits each month, this revenue does not come close to covering our costs. It is therefore time to re-approach the way adverts are served at the Guardian. Under my leadership we will remove ourselves from Google AdSense and no longer share any reader data with them. Instead, we will scale up our in-house advertising sales system, profile our readers to generate unique data on their interests and behaviors, and create a Google AdWords alternative that clients can buy into directly to ensure we receive the full rates for our advertising.

Our U.S. focused service needs to localize better to attract significant interest from what should be a major revenue-generating market. I therefore propose recalibrating our “Networks” model to cover not only far-flung regions like Africa and Northeast Asia, but also to create state-by-state specialist services throughout the U.S. By partnering with respectable local bloggers and entering content sharing agreements with high quality local news services, we can build cost-effective and credible local state network system to drive new traffic and loyalty from the U.S. market. And in the medium-term we’ll be able to scale some of the benefits we currently serve our British audience to Americans passionate about issues we do well at covering. Longer-term, I will propose entering other emerging media environments with localized service, such as India, Brazil and South Africa, using a similar approach.

To decrease the influence of Facebook on our traffic patterns, we will invest in sharing our content in much more effective ways on services like Reddit, Snapchat and other emerging social platforms. And to stimulate interest from these burgeoning communities, we will our increase investment in creative digital journalism by funding interactive alternatives to straightforward text-based content.

While I know that paywalls may initially prove unpopular with our readers, the type of journalism we stand for is not sustainable in the long-term without this potentially significant revenue stream. Coupled with my other ideas outlined in this proposal, I believe we have what it takes to make the Guardian a success for decades to come.

Matt MacVey: Reporting will no longer be a solitary endeavor. Reporters will be trained on using multimedia tools and in collaborating effectively with multimedia producers. Reporters will own a beat, not a medium. Reporters will be on small ad hoc teams to create unique print and online storytelling.

The Guardian’s audience is increasingly mobile. Keep in mind that we are designing for screen sizes, interfaces, and tempos of content consumption. We won’t be competing for clickbait or short-form mobile content. We will promote our stories based on their quality and relevance. When our data shows that a story is of particularly timely use to our readers we will respond immediately by propagating it.

Delivering insightful news from a wide variety of perspectives requires that our newsroom and organization is filled with the best and brightest from every background. We will broaden our recruitment efforts and conduct blind outside evaluations of our staff as we promote.

Reporters should read and comment (comments from Guardian staff will be edited and held to the same standards of reporting) on articles. A letter to the editor can now be a video or interactive designed in collaboration with the Guardians creative department.

We will create explainers and longform journalism to engage our audience. These are the resources for people that are coming to the Guardian to satisfy their curiosity and want to understand current events. This is our clickbait.

The reader journey will be that: 1. they know something is going on in the world and they will come to the Guardian because the brand represents depth and understanding to them. or 2. They will feel compelled to know what the Guardian has to offer on a current subject and they will also be reminded on social media that the Guardian offers in-depth content.

We will monetize these visitors through their good will and not with premium pricing. We can collect a lot of information about them and have them answer survey questions in order to look at our explainers. We can offer easy ways to donate in support of the Guardian in exchange for personalized and sentimental gifts that remind them of their favorite and the most human parts of the Guardian experience. There is no limit to the size of the donations that readers can give to the Guardian.

Ilan Greenberg: As a nonprofit media company, The Guardian can capitalize on its independence from the tyranny of quarterly returns. It can invest in the long-haul. It can prioritize newsgathering and storytelling —and embrace new technologies— ahead of its competitors.

What this means is a program of furiously integrating new technologies into stories rather than adding them like spouting appendages. Podcasts and other audio platforms need to be integrated into text, just as video and photography should be incorporated seamlessly. The future structure of revenue streams, whether from advertising or membership schemes or corporate sponsorship or anything else, will need to be developed within the totality of The Guardian’s immersive storytelling, not corresponded to a discrete platform.

The Guardian must focus on monetizing its global reach. To do this, the editor-in-chief will need to ensure its journalism continues to be one of few media outlets trusted to take on authority, such as with the overreach of surveillance programs, The Guardian must continue to aggressively report on the overarching narratives that are swirling around the world, from wealth disparity to government overreach to climate change and the power of the very large corporations. The economic and social challenges now facing the world dovetail with The Guardian’s traditional concerns, and so the company has a special responsibility and a unique opportunity to make its journalism relevant around the world.

On the business side, the mandate must be to monetize this global editorial reach, with new partnerships and relationships with foreign media, integration of translation and other technologies to reach non-English speaking audiences, more sponsorships from overseas corporations, and new approaches to syndication of The Guardian’s products.

Rebecca Harris: There needs to be a creative team dedicated to creating innovative revenue solutions to offset the decline in print. I would create an innovation team whose sole purpose would be to come up with new revenue streams and solutions.

The Guardian has already started expanding revenues into the physical realm with Guardian Space and Guardian membership. I’m referring to the Guardian’s development of a 30,000 square foot space that will be used for events and is set to open in 2016. The space will be available to anyone who pays a membership fee.

I would expand even further in hosting live Guardian events around the world. If the Guardian could move one percent of its 105 million unique visitors to register for the lowest level of membership, a free “Friends” subscription, that would be one million known customers. And registration for membership is an on-ramp for paying for news products, commercials products, etc.

We now live in a digital environment with free-flowing information and global connectivity. As editor-in-chief I would fundamentally rethinking the Guardian’s journalists’ relationship with the audience. Audience engagement has become more than a simple comment section. Individuals have so many different ways of express their opinion and generating their own content with the abundance of platform that are available to us in today’s world. We need to at the same time harness the power of those platforms and integrate them into our own, and provide new ways of audience engagement. Focusing on engaging with your audience is most important thing, and I’d make that a top priority at the Guardian.

I’d rethink how to make our content as sharable as possible. I’d put a team together to create new engagement tools for the website that lets our audience interact with the content beyond a comment section.

Targeting a younger demographic in addition to the Guardian’s already giant audience would be a huge push of mine. Looking to the future also means looking to the future audience and making sure that we are producing news that speaks to them and doesn’t alienate. That means producing more explanatory content, and having a focus on producing content that goes beyond breaking news. It also means engaging young people outside of the digital space and doing events that involve them and inspire them to be informed and discuss what’s going on in the world.

Kuang Keng Kuek Ser: Our newly launched membership program creates more opportunities for us to interact with our audience, and opens up a new revenue stream for the organization. However, is that all? I suggest that this is the start of a new experiment to involve our audience in the workflow of our news production. We should extend the membership program into our newsroom, creating both physical and digital platforms for the audience to be able to effectively participate in, not just the downstream — comment and feedback — but the upstream of news production — news ideas, news sources and news coverage. Can we imagine the day when we can regularly share our bylines with our audience? Since the arrival of digital journalism, many journalists believe the notion of “the audience know more than us” but how to effectively tap into the intelligence and resources of the audience remains an unsolved question. With a vibrant audience community and public trust, I believe we have a strong foundation to lead this experiment and crack the question.

We were once an early mover in digital journalism, for example our data blog and live reporting format. Somehow the momentum decelerated and soon others were ahead of us. To get back in the race, I suggest we start from diversification of our newsroom through both recruitment and collaboration. The interdisciplinary nature of journalism requires us to have talents from different worlds — gaming industry, virtual reality, filmmaking, psychology and sensor industry, just to name a few. The key to fully utilize the digital space for journalism is no longer just technology, but the understanding of interactions between human and machine which requires a multidisciplinary approach. This is particularly important for us to engage the digital natives.

A huge part of our credibility and reputation is earned through bold and impactful investigative reporting. I would like to further strengthen this advantage by allocating more resources in investigations that have global impacts, and transforming the Guardian into an investigative reporting hub for both journalists and the public. As we all know, journalists tend to see their investigations as top secrets and are reluctant to share the process and information beyond what is revealed in their reports. We need to change this culture. The corruptions and wrongdoings of those in power are no longer constrained by boundaries, hence our investigative journalists need to collaborate with their counterparts in other countries and tap into the expertise of our global audience. The investigations should not stop at publication.

Platforms for audience to contribute to further investigation should be created. The processes and raw information behind the investigation should be made transparent. Our investigation tools and expertise should be shared with our counterparts in other parts of the world. While digital disruption has forced many newsrooms to cut down expenses on investigative reporting, it is not just an opportunity to strengthen our competitive edge, but an obligation as responsible journalists.

Maria Sanchez: Listen more: Be where the people are. WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest … our readers move faster than we do. The Guardian needs to be present in all the new ecosystems appearing online. We have to join our communities of readers and participate in the platforms where they already gather, especially if we want to keep in touch with young people and their interests. But it would be a mistake just to sign up for whatever new tool comes out and use it feed people more and more of our content, in an unidirectional way. Instead, we must learn about their communities, become a member of these communities and find new ways to add value, listen and become useful. We can no longer expect people to come to us.

Keep breaking stories: To break stories that challenge the powerful, the political and economic forces that rule our world must remain the core activity for us. We must keep producing relevant content about things that really matter to the public and fulfill the classic requirements of traditional journalism: accuracy and fairness.

Tell those stories in innovative ways: As journalists today, we have more resources than ever to do our jobs better — jobs that are increasingly enriched by technology and the interaction of different actors. We need to be original in exploring new narrative formats like short-attention-span vertical videos or immersive storytelling. If we don’t encourage creativity, if we’re not brave enough to imagine ingenious and original uses for them, our users will do our jobs for us. We won’t be necessary anymore. Beautiful design matters; storytelling matters; multimedia matters, and video matters.

Place the user at the center of the process: The media are no longer simply the messenger: the user has now become the center of the reporting process. We need to open our product, creating new ways to include, incorporate, and serve the readers in the reporting process. This will mean counting them in the decision-making process and working with them before instead of after.

Promote versatile journalistic profiles and diverse voices: The Guardian must make an effort to diversify its voice, incorporating actors from different ethnicities, nationalities, political points of view, and even languages that help us rethink and reshape our traditional beats. Diversity also applies to the newsroom composition. We must create teams that incorporate professionals with diverse backgrounds who embrace multidisciplinary skills (coding, entertainment, user-centered design, product managing, business, advertising, etc.). This will make our products more competitive and significant for our audience.

Be an advocate for data: In the last few years, data has become the new darling of digital journalism. It would be a mistake to consider it as just a mean to build amazing new stories, with an extra level of accuracy. Media outlets like The Guardian must become advocates for an open government, pushing institutions all over the world to open up to their citizens and make data available for everyone. In addition, The Guardian should keep incorporating society into the analysis of the data available, as we have done in the past.

Go (really) mobile: Each day it seems more obvious that our phones are not only mobile devices: they are an extension of ourselves, almost a new part of our organism. As we develop new ways to interact with the world with them, The Guardian must adjust its mission to find a fit in this reality. Again, considering mobile just a new desktop screen and feeding our users more of our content will not be enough.

Become essential: The Internet is a bewildering world where outstanding streams of information fight every day for the public’s finite attention. A prestigious heritage and our brand’s reputation are not enough to guarantee our future success. We must strive to be essential to our reader’s daily diet. We have analytic tools that allow us to learn more about our audience’s behavior, its needs and interests. We have social networks that allow us to engage with those readers in an intimate way. A truly and genuine compromise with engagement will be key to accomplishing this mission.