2014 has been a wakeup call for journalists to protect their sources and themselves, following Edward Snowden's release of NSA data showing that privacy is rare in this digital era.

News organizations began to protect data and readers by using HTTPs instead of HTTP.

The way we told stories in the past doesn’t always work today.

Traditionally, editors and reporters would think of stories they believed the audience needed, and then deliver those stories as best they could. But in our increasingly mobile and wired world, audiences change quickly. How can an editor be confident that a story that seems important to the audience really is?

The short answer: By getting to know the audience so deeply that their needs are revealed. If that sounds impossible, take heart.

Over the past 22 years, 1,059 journalists have been killed. Worldwide, some 430 journalists are in exile from their home countries. Hundreds more are injured, persecuted, muzzled, and threatened, mostly by governments and sometimes by influential non-governmental forces, all interested in stifling a free, fearless press. Much of this happens in countries where autocratic regimes are the norm and press freedom is ignored.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of lip service paid, often after the fact, to such threats. In December, for instance, the U.N.

“Hala Nigeria,” a program of ICFJ’s Knight International Journalism Fellowships, is helping Nigerian journalists do a better job of tracking the deadly Ebola virus. As a Knight Innovation Fellow in Nigeria, I am helping Vivienne Irikefe of Television Continental (TVC) to show how the virus is spreading across West Africa.

Irikefe won the story contest as part of the Hala Nigeria program (which means “Speak out, Nigeria” in pidgin English). The program is designed to spur better coverage of vital health issues and increase audience engagement in those stories.