It’s almost a wrap for 2015, and what a year it was for the media. Here are my notables, plus my two disappointments.

Much has happened to advance storytelling. One of the most important, in my view, is that we don’t hear the phrase “digital first” as often as we did in 2014.  It is more about “the story first” now.  Concern about platforms has become secondary. The story as protagonist is where it’s at and should continue to be.  Those who populate newsrooms globally are getting the idea: we are in the storytelling business and we now have more platforms than ever to tell those stories. Amen to that, but I hope 2016 will be a year to concentrate on the need for innovative and creative storytelling techniques. Read more

John Dickerson. (Richard Shotwell, AP)

Let’s prepare for the new year with a very firm grasp of the obvious: This has been an often inscrutable, fascinating and even galling presidential campaign.

Conventional media wisdom has often proven totally wayward. Jeb Bush and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker would be forces to really reckon with, right? Donald Trump was a flash in the pan. Hillary Clinton had distinct vulnerabilities that the likes of Martin O’Malley could well exploit.

There were many more miscues in what remains an engrossing, if at times unseemly campaign, especially on the Republican side. Bar Muslims from entering the country? Who figured that would be an issue or that the GOP candidate leading in early polls would be charged by a New York Times editorial with bringing his party “to the brink of fascism”? Read more

Screen shot, The Des Moines Register

Each month in this column, I try to feature journalists who are telling important stories using public records. For my final column of 2015, I wanted to do something big and decided to find public records stories from all 50 states (plus, a bonus: Washington, D.C.).

This is not meant to be a “best of” list. It’s simply a collection of public records stories from the past year that intrigued me. I found many of the stories by searching the National Freedom of Information Coalition’s website, as well as Investigative Reporters & Editors.

I also got some ideas from fellow journalists who wrote to me on Twitter @RecordsGeek. If you have a story you want to share, I’d love to hear about it and may feature it in an upcoming column. Read more

We saw our world on riveting front pages this year: the loss of journalists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the chaos of other mass shootings, the body of Syrian boy on a beach and New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina.

There was much, much more: a deadly earthquake in Nepal, waves of celebrations after the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, the Pope’s U.S. visit and, yes, a new “Star Wars.”

Here’s a look at some of the fronts from major news events in 2015. Note: Some of these images are graphic.

Jan. 8:

On January 7, terrorists broke into the office of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people. By that evening, news organizations around the world started tweeting front page tributes to the victims. Read more

B Rosen on Flickr

Expecting infallibility from journalists is unrealistic. Granted, sometimes, corrections are entirely unwarranted, like this one from NPR.

Clarification May 21, 2015
In a previous correction on this post, we corrected something that was actually correct. So we have corrected that correction. It had to do with Celsius temperatures.

Some corrections are so brilliant they are nearly worth the mistakes that generated them, while others indicate serious organizational flaws and risk having terrible consequences.

Following a tradition started by “Regret the Error” author Craig Silverman, whose list on BuzzFeed Canada you should definitely read, we looked back at some of the most notable corrections of 2015 (Poynter articles included).

The funny

Add this correction on The New York Times to the many great things Adele’s “Hello” has done for humanity. Read more

In 1975, two equally important events happened in the life of prolific political journalist Mary McGrory; she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her coverage of Watergate, and it was revealed that she was on President Nixon’s enemies list. There was no love lost between the two. “If he were a horse, I would not buy him,” McGrory wrote of Nixon.

In John Norris’s new biography “Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism,” readers learn that Nixon’s hatred of McGrory led to her being audited by the IRS three years in a row. McGrory was the winner in that regard. Her significant charitable giving resulted in receiving a bigger refund than she had realized. As detailed by Norris throughout the book, McGrory usually emerged the winner in any tussle with a political figure. Read more

The sign for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. (AP Photo)

Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s family was unmasked mid-week as the “secret buyer” of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Given Adelson’s support for the Republican party, many have wondered whether he will use the paper to advance his pet political causes or business interests.

On Friday, the Review-Journal continued its aggressive coverage of the sale with a story offering strong circumstantial evidence that an investigative project a month ago targeted a Las Vegas judge who is hearing a wrongful termination suit against Adelson’s Sands Casino operation.

The story offered this strange sequence of events:

• Three Review-Journal reporters were asked to monitor and gather information on three business court judges. One of the judges, Elizabeth Gonzalez, has jurisdiction in a long-running case against Sands, clashed with Adelson when he took the witness stand and fined the company for its lawyers’ actions twice.