He proclaimed "#16" and everyone nodded sagely

Starting my eighth year at Mizzou tomorrow, the second year of teaching from my textbook, and who knows how many years speaking on the conference circuit (and Tweeting), I am finally prepared to number my pithy sayings and insist people memorize them. Yes, like the Analects of Confucius, or the “prison joke” joke.“He called out ‘Number 47, and everyone laughed.” So, a handful in no particular order of worthiness:

1. Innovation is the creation of new social or economic value.
2. A fire extinguisher is designed to “do good,” but I would not hire an arsonist to use it.
3. Objectivity in the practice of journalism should be a spear, not a shield.
4. As a tool for skill support, AI can raise your ceiling, but it can’t build you a second floor.
5. Information used to be expensive to distribute—then came the Web. Information used to be expensive to access—then came mobile. Information used to be expensive to produce—then came AI.
6. The job of news is to help a community to understand itself.
7. Big Tech will only solve profitable problems, not important ones.
8. CMS is destiny.
9. The last assumptions to fall are the most expensive, financially or emotionally.
10. Problem-solving is enabled or constrained by the experiences and biases of those in the room.
11. Technology is a tool, not a solution.
12. It is an interesting time if publishers are waking up to the realization that algorithms are not relationships, and scale is not a business model.
13. People who are regularly granted unfair exceptions usually trust in the fairness of the system.
14. Our business decisions don't need to be "perfect," we just need them to be more informed by some objective reality.
15. If you wonder what the marginally free creation of AI slop will do to the Internet, when was the last time you answered your phone?
16. Community (and trust) does not scale.
17. The thing about imperfect and broken complex systems is that they are immediately everyone's problem in ways that most people did not previously understand.
18. I trust some national journalists to get the facts right, but the story wrong.
19. To participate in change, people need to believe it is necessary, practical, and possible.
20. The “Lost Carburetor Effect” in cars and technology leads consumers to become passive users, not mechanics or developers.

Seriously, when you teach the same subject for several years, or write something as long as a book, it feels like you are repeating yourself a lot, even to people who haven't read the book or been in class.