To close out 2014, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2015 will bring for the future of journalism. Here’s what they had to say.
“We have to stop thinking about how to leverage whatever hot social platform is making headlines and instead spend time understanding how communication is changing.”
“Those conversations will inform innovation in reporting and design methodologies and continue to revolutionize the ways we keep communities informed.”
“Organizations are realizing that actual diversity results takes effort and commitment, and can’t be waved away with an obligatory seminar and vague promises to do better. It comes down to making it a priority.”
“2015 will see a return to discussion formats that permit individuals to create and maintain a profile separate from their primary social and professional profile.”
“The best attitude for navigating the next year is one of receptivity — understanding that so many things are opening and expanding in ways we can’t perceive.”
“At some point, the printing press, radio, and television were all ‘technology’ too. Now they’re Journalism 101. Yesterday’s ‘technology’ is an integral part of today’s daily routine.”
“By coupling a format that encourages intimacy with a network design that encourages out-of-context amplification, Twitter has evolved into something fundamentally volatile.”
“Facebook now consists of a stream of advertisements interspersed with your friends’ wedding and baby photos. Why should this organization have any effect whatsoever on news, politics, or any other serious area of our culture?”
“News organizations used to get by with minimal research expenditures because, for most of the second half of the 20th century, they had major profits and operated in fairly stable markets.”
“It’s a mistake to characterize gonzo as emotional and thus erratic: On the contrary, the approach is about emotion applied carefully — curated emotion, emotion and reason working together, objectivity and subjectivity as parallel processes and not polar opposites.”
“Will virtual reality deliver a journalism experience and immerse our audience in the story in a way we couldn’t before? Or will it feel too intrusive?”
“For those of us with one foot in the print world and the other online, we need new systems that enable us to write once, run anywhere, and move fast.”
“International news brands have been paying serious attention to the country’s rapacious appetite for news for some time, but this year saw a marked step up.”
“The old challenge was often phrased as getting it first or getting it right, but in the knowledge-first era journalists face a new mandate — getting it to make sense.”
“The same bingo drinking-game template works for tech’s back-patting and journalism’s navel-gazing. Journalism indulges its own buzzwords, dogma, and secret-handshake crap.”
“The losers are going to be external websites who have become reliant on the Facebook traffic firehose. That traffic is going to start falling, in 2015, for the first time.”
“No longer will there be a singular front page — instead, each person will see a news mix refined ever so slightly to reflect their region, interests, and habits.”
“Venture capital, after its brief dalliance with the media industry, will forget about content and return to its first love, totally imaginary markets.”
“Name me a paid-for news site with a payment method so easy that a new subscriber could sign up in less than five minutes while in a dark room after having consumed a few glasses of festive punch.”
“When we begin to think of race as something we should all care about, no longer will the black reporter be the first to raise her hand to go to Ferguson.”
“Personal, and typically IRL, disagreements will find new life online in 2015. Writers will call bullshit on other writers, pointing fingers, responding with substance and heart.”
