Re:filtered #12: The metamorphosis of media leadership & 2025 predictions

Welcome to the 12th edition of my monthly newsletter on civic media opportunities in a moment of systemic disruption.

This month is about institutions and leadership, and predictions and aspirations for the new year.

Until about a year ago this month, whenever I was in Prague, I walked past this sign on my way to work:

There was something poetic about passing Franz Kafka's grave each morning heading to a legacy media newsroom, a daily reminder of how institutions can lose their way. 

Kafka wrote about courts that were meant to serve justice. Yet these institutions became so entangled in their own processes and narratives that they lost their purpose – this reminded me so much of the state of media today, where Kafka's characters often found themselves trapped in bureaucracies that put systemic, performative perpetuation over substance.

Many legacy media organizations have become similarly faceless machines, focused more on their own perpetuation than their original mission to serve people. They are simultaneously wrestling with their broadcast heritage and infrastructure, facing declining reach and relevance, and often producing "content" that increasingly fails to connect with real people.

Yet, these institutions can still serve vital functions – preserving journalistic craft, fostering critical thinking, and providing stability for exceptional talent: gifted writers, thinkers, artists, and public servants who, like all of us, need to make a living. We can't afford to waste this potential, trapping it in systems that are often reduced to mediocrity and patronage networks.

The path forward isn't a binary choice between preserving outdated institutions or abandoning them entirely. Bold leadership can transform some of these existing organizations into something new, and start new ones – institutions that serve real/resized purpose in a world increasingly shaped by more creators and platforms.

This challenge of transforming media institutions, and creating new ones, will be one of the defining stories of 2025. I'm excited to watch a new generation of leaders emerge and reimagine what media organizations could look like.

My past work in organization transformation and my walks past Kafka's grave in Prague, led me to believe I could help identify transformative leaders. So when some media boards sought my help with executive hires after my transition from Radio Free Europe, I thought I could make a difference.

The challenge proved far more complex than expected. Many who clearly see its problems lack leadership experience and wouldn't last long enough in boardroom politics to achieve change, while other more experienced leaders struggle to break free from the outdated paradigms and impact myths of broadcasting.

What's particularly rare are candidates who combine deep editorial expertise with proven managerial capability, and the ability to think systematically and critically about delivering real value to people.... while at the same time managing expectations of boards and staff alike.

A key challenge I found was the lack of clear hiring criteria for modern media leadership. Most hiring committees haven't even begun to define the capabilities needed to navigate today's landscape, either going for established status or digital guru, but neither really works.

I've watched my own generation of digital-first leaders chase algorithmic success just as our predecessors chased broadcast ratings. Both approaches share the same flaw: measuring success through reach rather than service. The risk is that we're simply replacing one form of performative metrics with another.

Neither address the multiple pressures legacy organizations face: from unsustainable cost structures, outdated technology, unrealistic expectations, and declining relevance.

My hope for 2025 is that we finally move beyond growth hacking and embrace genuine service as a core business objective in media. I hope we finally start to look at SEO and social distribution as tactics, not strategy. We need that shift to a focus on service also to reacquire lost social capital. I am looking forward to the many forms information as a service – powered by the craft of journalism – will take.

But this raises another question: how does one distinguish between those who preach it and those who mean it, especially at a time when the performative declarations around the value of Journalism are at a fever pitch?

Seeking answers, I ended many of my calls and meetings over the past month with questions around this. I asked dozens of friends and colleagues to describe their ideal media leader – what qualities would inspire them to do their best work?

Below are some key points they mentioned. If you're on a hiring committee, these are some things to look for. If you're aspiring to be or already are an executive, these are key skills to work on. If you work in media, ask yourself if your manager has these (and if not and you have other options, whether you want to move on).

A media leader is someone who:

1. Can demonstrate with concrete examples how their journalism has improved real people's lives.
2. Can identify emerging revenue streams, understand audience shifts, and spot competitive threats as they materialize.
3. Has hands-on experience in content creation/editing, audience development/management, and business/fundraising/revenue operations.
4. Has cut through red tape and made things simpler, more effective, and more joyful. They can show what processes they fixed and why it worked.
5. Knows how changes ripple through an organization – can give examples of connecting different teams to solve problems.
6. Actually listens and helps their people grow – proven by team members who have stuck with them and thrived (by merit, not patronage).
7. Admits when they're wrong and fixes it, with real examples of course-correcting after mistakes.
8. Explains their decisions clearly and shares both good and bad news directly, informed by team feedback.

I’ve put some of the great responses I got on my site for further reading. Thank you Feli, Lynn and everyone who so kindly helped me think through this. 

Personally, question #1 has become my test – it immediately shows if someone has drunk too much of our collective Kool-Aid.

Red flags in responses include: talk of "hard-hitting" breaking news, a ritualistic implementation of the BBC needs model, reflexive references to industry awards and conferences, invocations of undifferentiated human rights or the "international community," high-minded declarations about balance and objectivity, about mis- and disinformation, or that special form of name-dropping that suggests more networking than real commitment and work. (These are real life examples from the past year.)

I've met many journalists this year who have given me plenty of hope – from veteran broadcasters to digital natives to those unburdened by either tradition. They're thinking critically about how journalism can truly serve people again.

Like me, they're embracing this period of crisis as an opportunity to rethink old assumptions, experiment and learn.

Here are some key things that I want to learn more about/watch in the coming year:

1. Audience research is evolving from a tiny, sometimes stale, gatekeeper-dominated tactical field to an open conversation that informs newsroom strategies. Newsrooms like Arizona Luminaria are sharing their research methodologies and findings instead of treating them as proprietary secrets. This shift is pushing us beyond traditional metrics and quant-heavy, expensive consultancies, often offering flawed, pseudo-mathematical certainty toward deeper and more pervasive empathy – for instance, mapping how different groups navigate housing or healthcare decisions.
2. All beats will go Bellingcat. Exiled media are pioneering remote reporting techniques that will inspire journalists everywhere. Taking cues from open-source investigation methods, I hope we'll see more such reporting and more newsrooms building crowd-sourcing networks. In 2025, we will learn more ways journalism can surprise even without physical access. (At Gazzetta, we are just starting a project on this, related to the job market in an autocracy.)
3. Journalism entrepreneurs will be moving beyond individual subscription services to forming more collectives to share more back-office operations and reduce individual operating costs, legal risks, and general business complexity. I will be particularly watching for how independent journalists are sharing tech infrastructure.
4. Legacy media have an opportunity to transform into media support spaces. I would love to see some of these organizations experimenting with more dedicated specialized support programs for emerging creators, providing them with support they need to thrive, based on a pact focused on public service, or investigative powerhouses with deep beat expertise. This kind of use of institutional knowledge and infrastructure could help develop more widely accepted models of public service journalism.
5. The fediverse conversation for media will hopefully evolve beyond just looking for Twitter alternatives. I hope to see more experiments in community moderation, more media organizations hosting their own instances, and new forms of federated content sharing becoming more accessible, such as long-form text and audio. All these developments point to more broligarch-resilient ways of self-expression.

Looking back

December was a busy but joyful month as we welcomed guests and reconnected with old friends. 

I submitted a massive audience research report that the Gazzetta team worked on for six months, and that I was thinking about nearly all the time.

I had to force us to stop as we could have continued for months more. Empathy research – a term I've started to prefer over design research – is incredibly addictive when done remotely, much like reporting. When approached iteratively, it feels a bit like fractal art. There's literally no limit to discovering new information opportunities.

We'll keep developing this research in two key areas: finding indirect ways to understand people's true needs (since they often can't tell us directly), and measuring how many people might benefit from different types of news services. We've also started building some helpful tech tools to make this research easier, which I'm excited to develop further (if funding can be found).

It was exciting to discover that others in this space are working on similar methodologies. We are getting together to share them in Taipei in February, aiming to iterate based on feedback and inspire future research. More on this in next month's newsletter.

A training session this month with Erika Hall from Mule Design Studio (strongly recommend) reminded me of the need to ask the right questions in media research. She shared how Walmart apparently lost over a billion dollars by asking customers "Do you want less clutter?" (who doesn't), when what shoppers actually cared about were lower prices and more inventory.

This and other conversations this month have reinforced my commitment to sharing knowledge and supporting likeminded peers more in 2025.

With that in mind, I'm making some changes for 2025:

Looking ahead

I am retiring the coffee tipping service from this newsletter. The truth is I'm privileged enough to pay for my own, and coffee should be enjoyed during conversations. Everyone who kindly bought me a drink can expect one the next time we meet. I'll keep a record.

And I'm paying forward the favor. I'll offer about two to four free confidential coaching calls or meetings a month for subscribers to this newsletter, depending on travels and other obligations. I'll share the upcoming slots in the newsletter. Book slots in January here.

Despite my best intentions, 2025 will be another travel-heavy year. In February, I hope to see many friends at RightsCon in Taipei. If you're there and interested in our informal audience research sharing gathering, let me know. In March, I'll be briefly back in Prague. In April, I'll be at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. If you're going, let me know.

My 2025 will not be about seeking solace and status in preserving and saving; it will be about building, doing, and growing; failing and learning. May it be a year of genuine surprise, and gratitude for it.

Thank you for reading and joining me on this journey of learning. There's something deeply liberating in exploring challenges without having all the answers. Don't you think?

This article has been reviewed by the Department of Editorial Excellence (Form K-12) and approved by the Bureau of Strategic Impact & Engagement Metrics (Subcommittee: Truth-Telling).

Impact Metrics: Zero paradigm shifts achieved, three strategic pivots initiated (pending), one meaningful conversation documented (awaiting final stakeholder validation).

Warning: The Office of Editorial Standards notes that prolonged exposure to this newsletter may cause an inexplicable chronic aversion to "platform innovation" and severe allergies to "strategic content optimization."