Predictions for Journalism 2017 » Collections » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Predictions for Journalism 2017

Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and digital media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Here’s what they had to say.

Updating through Dec. 19

Most recent first Random order

Andy Rossback | The year of the user | “It is building exceptional editorial design sensibilities — and the character of our communities or content — into our products that will separate us from easy-to-install WordPress themes.”

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel | A rebirth of populist journalism | “If there’s one thing that 2017 could hope to emulate, it’s the muckrakers’ ability to produce journalism that is genuinely concerned with the interest of the people, fiercely adversarial but never personalized.”

Amy O'Leary | Not just covering communities, reaching them | “Journalists will finally dig in to understand how their stories travel in our information ecosystem.”

Rebekah Monson | Journalism is community-as-a-service | “Sure, Facebook’s standardized display and positioning of content doesn’t help users make informed choices, but journalism can’t shirk responsibility for cheapening the product offering.”

Nathalie Malinarich | Making it easy | “It’s not about dumbing down or giving up on context — it’s about learning a new grammar that works on a small screen in a distributed world.”

Mary Walter-Brown | Getting comfortable asking for money | “News organizations spend so much time telling everyone else’s stories that we forget to tell their own.”

Claire Wardle | Verification takes center stage | “The misinformation ecosystem is much more nuanced than simply fake news.”

Juan Luis Sánchez | Your predictions are our present | “The time when everything in journalism and media happened in the States and was then exported to the rest of the world is over.”

Moreno Cruz Osório | The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism | “Openness and transparency can help journalism reaffirm its value with the audience, creating the conditions to leverage new business models.”

Mary Meehan | Feeling blue in a red state | “I hope the left-leaning elements of journalism (of which I would be a card-carrying member if we actually printed cards) take a minute for reflection before moving onto blaming only fake news and Russian hacking for the rise of Trump.”

Almar Latour | Thanks, #fakenews | “Journalism is often at its best during periods of genuine turmoil or uncertainty.”

Sue Schardt | Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love | “The power of media is the power of reflecting human experience.”

Aja Bogdanoff | Comments start pulling their weight | “Audiences are hungry for trusted news and debate outside the walled gardens of the big echo-chamber platforms.”

Ole Reißmann | Un-faking the news | “We need to vaccinate the public with real journalism: explaining in detail how we come to a conclusion, how facts are gathered, what should be considered a fact and why — how journalism works.”

Sarah Wolozin | Virtual reality on the open web | “This is good news for journalists working with VR: Billions can access their content, not millions.”

AX Mina | 2017 is for the attention innovators | “New strategies of attention have shaped many of the (often divisive) outcomes of recent referenda and elections across multiple continents, and they will continue to be a driving force in 2017 and beyond.”

Swati Sharma | Failing diversity is failing journalism | “Management’s interest in diversity can ebb and flow — more pressing matters appear, and minority hiring takes a backseat. But next year is a good time to start.”

Alexis Lloyd | Public trust for private realities | “How can journalism act as a public service when there is no “public” to serve, only a set of increasingly private spaces that are largely invisible to one another?”

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon | Truthiness in private spaces | “Mobile chat applications allow private and segmented conversations, different interpretations, and different sets of facts.”

Sam Ford | The year we talk about our awful metrics | “The industry is running on metrics that serve no one well, but we continue chugging along because we all equally accept the lie.”

P. Kim Bui | The year journalism teaches again | “In telling stories, in exposing lies, we should be teaching the public how to evaluate what they read.”

Ryan McCarthy | Platforms grow up or grow more toxic | “2017 may be the year Facebook gets permanently branded as part of the problem.”

S.P. Sullivan | Baking transparency into our routines | “In 2017, let’s tell readers every day: Here’s what we learned, here’s how we confirmed it, and here’s how you can do the same.”

Alice Antheaume | A new test for French media | “Journalists from all over the world (France included) stand accused of being disconnected with reality and unable to forecast the news.”

Andrew Ramsammy | Rise of the rebel journalist | “News is not journalism if what’s being reported is only meant to extract value from communities as opposed to creating value within them.”

Rachel Sklar | Women are going to get loud | “Does this mean every single new tweet or podcast or TinyLetter or YouTube video will explode into viral acclaim? Of course not. But some of them will. Because there is an audience for it, and a market for it.”

Ariane Bernard | Better data about your users | “The path to personalization, especially personalization steeped in journalistic ethos, requires access to holistic data about users that extends beyond the borders of the news organization’s platform.”

Joanne Lipman | The year of the drone, really | “Now comes the fun part: for journalists to let their imaginations roam free, to invent new ways to bring stories to life.”

Andrea Silenzi | Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis | “Many new listeners will arrive seeking refuge from Facebook’s fake news buffet and Twitter’s ideologue clutter, while expecting the speed of news they’ve became accustomed to from over-the-air radio and television.”

Pablo Boczkowski | Fake news and the future of journalism | “We can feel nostalgic about a media world slowly but steadily waning, or instead imagine that perhaps a more decentralized and effective everyday culture of critique and argumentation might emerge over time.”

Ståle Grut | The battle for high-quality VR | “It’s time to acknowledge that your audience does not need to see your every stumble on the way to virtual reality greatness.”

Dan Gillmor | Fix the demand side of news too | “We can’t just upgrade journalists. We, the people who use media mostly as consumers and sharers, have to upgrade ourselves, too.”

Kawandeep Virdee | Moving deeper than the machine of clicks | “Sites will explore further what it means to allow readers to be more active, giving their audience more expression and ability to take part in a two-way conversation.”

Erin Millar | The bottom falls out of Canadian media | “A federal innovation fund will spark the blooming of a thousand digital media startups. Well, okay, maybe 20 or so.”

Carrie Brown | We won’t do enough | “We’ll debate and have panels, and talk past each other.”

Annemarie Dooling | UGC as a path out of the bubble | “When we make listening the job of one or two people in a newsroom instead of remembering that this is the cornerstone of journalism, we lose track of what readers are actually taking from our work.”

Erin Pettigrew | A year of reflection in tech | “Where our culture of broadcast media once catered to the center and traded on trust, the age of social media thrives on contagious, memetic ideas replicating via network effects.”

Dan Colarusso | Let’s make live video we can love | “While audiences crave an authentic and fresh video experience, it seems like they’re still getting a lot of pundits and reporters simply talking at them.”

Sarah Marshall | Focusing on the why of the click | “We have only a surface-level appreciation of what motivates people and why they behave in a particular way.”

Samantha Barry | Messaging apps go mainstream | “Journalists, newsrooms and editors will tell stories using the language of messaging apps — stickers, emojis, gifs, vertical video.”

Tim Griggs | The year we stop taking sides | “Like many concepts that have outlived their usefulness, the wall between business and news was taken to absurd limits, creating a culture of divisiveness that lingers on today.”

Hillary Frey | Forests need to burn to regrow | “The drive for scale has made so many places way, way too big. And there just aren’t enough good jobs to keep everyone working, satisfied, succeeding.”

Laura E. Davis | Show your work | “Be authentic by being more honest about what you know and what you don’t. It’s a small part of all things we can do, but it’s something we can do now — and frankly should have been doing all along.”

Sydette Harry | Facing journalism’s history | “Journalism must shift from claiming to have all the answers to being the ones with the skills to survey the different perspectives, match them to the facts, and connect the two with the worlds that people actually live in.”

M. Scott Havens | Quality advertising to pair with quality content | “When you consider how publishers might compete with the platforms going forward, it seems likely it will take the same thoughtful and high-minded approach around advertising that we take now with our content.”

Ken Schwencke | Disaggregation and collection | “I think when people used to say ‘we have unlimited space online,’ they thought about longer stories with more sidebars. What if we use it to ‘show our work’ instead?”

Kathleen Kingsbury | Print as a premium offering | “While print may be less and less the product, it’s certainly a product — and an exciting one.”

Jim Friedlich | A banner year for venture philanthropy | “I say venture philanthropy because smart money is approaching investment in public-interest journalism with the mindset of venture investors.”

Andrew Losowsky | Building our own communities | “If we want people to stand up for our journalism, and to trust us again, we need to bring them closer to our work, to learn more about them, and to offer a range of ways to have a meaningful impact on what we do.”

Amy Webb | Journalism as a service | “The central challenge within news organizations is that there are immediate, acute problems — but reasonable solutions will require long-term investment in energy and capital.”

Mike Ragsdale | A smarter information diet | “We’ve gotten to where we don’t deliver the news people need — we deliver the news people want. And I think that’s dangerous.”

Alberto Cairo | Communicating uncertainty to our readers | “After what happened in the presidential election, I think there is going to be a growing interest in how to communicate data better to the public — and in particular how to communicate uncertainty.”

Cindy Royal | Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid | “In a dynamically changing environment, in which digital is a given, we can no longer support this lecturer-professor divide. Every hire a journalism program makes must be able to teach courses in the digital realm.”

Zizi Papacharissi | Distracted journalism looks in the mirror | “What is news, and what is noise? Do both deserve the same amount of attention?”

Lam Thuy Vo | The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication | “Many stories lay dormant in the vast amounts of data produced by everyday consumers because journalists are still only starting to acquire the large-scale data-wrangling expertise needed to tap them.”

Matt Karolian | AI improves publishing | “Robots will analyze complex editorial content of all lengths, and provide feedback to the humans sitting behind the keyboard.”

Michael Oreskes | Reversing the erosion of democracy | “Facts matter, and we need to believe in that.”

Libby Bawcombe | Kids board the podcast train | “Now is the time to take what we’ve learned from the podcast revolution and apply it to our littlest listeners.”

Umbreen Bhatti | A sense of journalists’ humanity | “We will see more suffering, not all of it far away, and we will see more journalists reveal how it affects them.”

Laura Walker | Authentic voices, not fake news | “I predict that in 2017, more news outlets will listen more deeply to the people of this country with genuine curiosity and without preconception.”

David Weigel | A test for online speech | “There will be a libel suit against pro-Trump online trolls who spread lies about a person or business, and it’ll test the laws governing online speech.”

Carla Zanoni | Prioritizing emotional health | “In short, finding ways to bring a new sense of humanity in the newsroom.”

Liz McMillen | The year of deep insights | “It’s a failure for today’s niche journalism if we don’t take all of the intellectual capital we provide and find ways to repurpose and repackage it, in the ways our audience demands.”

Corey Ford | The year of the rebelpreneur | “An informed and connected public is the bedrock of democracy. But with our journalistic institutions under threat economically, politically, and culturally, that bedrock is cracking.”

Doris Truong | Connecting with diverse perspectives | “To ensure that news reports have impact, we’ll need to connect with readers because we reflect the readers.”

Margarita Noriega | From pinning tweets to tweeting pins | “If it is a journalist’s job to report and analyze current events, we cannot do so while blind to the fact that people interact most directly with the news as consumers”

Steve Henn | The next revolution is voice | “The first killer apps in this space will look a lot like an intelligent, thoughtful radio — a radio station tuned to your interests, a station that knows who you are and listens.”

Ashley C. Woods | Local journalism will fight a new fight | “We will never be able to compete with the national news outlets on scale. So instead, we will acknowledge our strengths: Proximity. Intimacy. Fidelity.”

Tanya Cordrey | The resurgence of reach | “The mantra of ‘know your users and just concentrate on them’ may leave some news organizations fishing in an ever-shrinking pool of similar users.”

Vivian Schiller | Tested like never before | “News leaders will need to be brave enough to resist the urge to overcorrect.”

Emi Kolawole | From empathy to community | “Empathy may help discover unmet needs in the short term, but community will allow news organizations to scale solutions and build greater trust in the long term.”

Guy Raz | Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever | “The steady drumbeat of anger, violence, bullying, terror, war, despair, division, and fear will push people to seek out inspiration, meaning, and a reasoned exchange of ideas.”

Helen Havlak | Chasing mobile search results | “Some outlets will even choose what stories to cover based on anticipated search demand, walking the increasingly fine line between service journalism and content farming.”

Cory Haik | Navigating power in Trump’s America | “Welcome to fear and loathing in Trump’s America. Fear and loathing not only by the American citizenry, but also by the media whose job it is to cover him.”

Tracie Powell | Building reader relationships | “Currently, most — if not all — news organizations struggle to figure out who their existing users are, and they aren’t even close to knowing who their potential users are.”

Peter Sterne | A dangerous anti-press mix | “It’s not enough for people to read the news. They have to trust it.”

Tim Herrera | The safe space of service journalism | “The pendulum is swinging back, and at the forefront of that swing will be service journalism and trusted guidance.”

Robert Hernandez | History will exclude you, again | “Every aspect of technology has been also influenced by women and people of color — but somehow they get left out of the narrative and excluded from leadership roles.”

Scott Dodd | Nonprofits team up for impact | “But that only gets you so far if all those publications have a largely overlapping audience nested securely within the progressive bubble.”

Javaun Moradi | What can we own? | “2016 offered painful reminders of all the things that media doesn’t control.”

Gabriel Snyder | The aberration of 20th-century journalism | “High-quality, high-cost, and crucially high-impact journalism is a cultural form worthy of our support and protection and not a commercial product in search of a business model.”

Renée Kaplan | Pure reach has reached its limit | “In this coming year, publishers may no longer be able to afford to consider reach without return.”

Nushin Rashidian | A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions | “While large-scale social platform distribution makes sense for a number of publications to reach as many readers wherever they are on whatever device or platform, scale isn’t everything to everyone in the media ecosystem.”

Emily Goligoski | Incorporating audience feedback at scale | “Existing audiences who feel that their experiences are seriously considered are more likely to remain engaged and, where relevant, pay to subscribe.”

Burt Herman | Local news gets interesting | “Going deep with local news means creating uniquely valuable journalism, rather than fighting the traffic battle against dozens of hot takes on Washington’s latest twists and turns.”

Nicholas Quah | Podcasting’s coming class war | “The independent community will be pressured into self-organizing. Though the ecosystem will end the year less open than when it started the year, there will at least be formal sites of resistance.”

Mario García | Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward | “Storytelling using VR will be easier to achieve, and more members of the audience will be prepared to welcome it.”

Asma Khalid | The year of the newsy podcast | “In a crowded marketplace, maybe that’s what young people want — reliable news with a trustworthy perspective. They’re not looking for omniscient objectivity, but trusted, truthful perspectives.”

Christopher Meighan | Unlocking a deeper mobile experience | “We are finally seeing some legitimate creative capabilities surface for app developers and editors that will allow for compelling experiences outside of the traditional app.”

Mathew Ingram | The Faustian Facebook dance continues | “What they are giving up in return may not be their souls, but it’s close enough.”

Geetika Rudra | Journalism is community | “Who is consuming our work? Is this audience different from who we would expect? Are there other people who would benefit from our work, and how do we reach them?”

Taylor Lorenz | “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing | “Because it produces better content, and because audiences that can go anywhere to get their news are increasingly demanding to be both informed and moved.”

Rubina Madan Fillion | Snapchat grows up | “Organizations that aren’t on Snapchat Discover will go beyond the experimental phase on Stories. The remaining skeptics won’t be for much longer.”

Mark Armstrong | Time to pay up | “Websites and email newsletters will remain the two most important tools for independent news publishing and distribution, three decades running.”

David Chavern | Fake news gets solved | “Yes, there will always be dark and stupid places on the internet that are just out to make a buck and that will always spread fake news. But most people won’t want to go there and great companies won’t want to play there.”

Errin Haines | Chaos or community? | “Newsrooms must hire decision-makers, not just reporters, who are reflective of the communities we cover.”

Trushar Barot | API or die | “By offering greater API access, news organizations can also experiment with becoming capable of being platforms themselves.”

Olivia Ma | The year collaboration beats competition | “Think about how much faster the industry would move if there was less focus on beating your competitor and more focus on learning from them.”

Millie Tran | International expansion without colonial overtones | “Geography, after all, is just one very imperfect proxy for who we are and what we want to read and consume.”

Lee Glendinning | A call for great editing | “The challenges we all face as journalists in framing, emphasis, skepticism, and tone call for highly focused editing which is unafraid, exacting, details-driven, and intelligent.”

Mira Lowe | News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton” | “Building news literacy and trust in the media is critical to helping the public discern what to believe, share and act on.”

Megan H. Chan | Cultural reporting goes mainstream | “Those who can articulate and help readers understand who we are as a society will now break out of academic salons and the literary set.”

Bill Adair | The year of the fact-checking bot | “The falsehoods will continue, but the bots will be a force multiplier to provide people with the truth.”

Mandy Velez | The audience is the source and the story | “People who normally wouldn’t tell their stories will now have their own audience, who will continue to serve as a ‘newsworthy’ litmus test.”

Jonathan Stray | A boom in responsible conservative media | “Conservative audiences deserve no less, even if they never read the Times again.”

Jonathan Hunt | Measurement companies get with the times | “If media is only becoming more distributed, then it requires an equally distributed solution for measuring its influence.”

Caitlin Thompson | High touch, high value | “We’re likely to see a return to the studio model, where IP is the most valuable asset a media company or an independent producer can leverage.”

Matt Waite | The people running the media are the problem | “It’s the safest prediction I could make beyond the sun coming up in the morning: You won’t fix this.”

Elizabeth Jensen | Trust depends on the details | “When they notice something sloppy, they tell you so, publicly. And when pollsters come around to ask whether mainstream, nonpartisan journalism is trustworthy, they tell them, too.”

David Skok | What lies beyond paywalls | “We can combine machine learning, predictive, and anticipatory analytics to optimize the value exchanged from this reader, on this device, coming from this platform, on this article, at this exact moment in time.”

Molly de Aguiar | Philanthropists galvanize around news | “Foundations should provide operating and project support with few or no strings attached.”

Ray Soto | VR moves from experiments to immersion | “If your production teams haven’t already heard of these terms, get to know them: ambisonics, stereoscopic rendering, and photogrammetry will be standard by the end of the year.”

Priya Ganapati | Mobile websites are ready for reinvention | “Digital-native news organizations have developed their own voice for the web. Now it’s time to bring on mobile-native experiences and content.”

Katie Zhu | The year of minority media | “Despite hiring more minority writers, the power structure in legacy news organizations is still largely controlled by the same types of people.”

Reyhan Harmanci | Bear witness — but then what? | “There needs to be calls to action, or at least discussion, that give meaning to the reams of primary documents.”

Coleen O'Lear | Back to basics | “Those who were duped by the fake news and half-truths that ran rampant won’t be fooled again. They want to be educated. They want to trust.”

Jon Slade | Trusted news, at a premium | “An essential area of growth next year will be in premium products at premium prices.”

Melody Kramer | Radically rethinking design | “2017 means rethinking every aspect of our designs: what they say, what they assume, and how they might better serve our audiences.”

Jeremy Barr | A terrible year for Tiers B through D | “Digital media just isn’t a great business right now, and the idea of ‘acquiring millennials’ by buying up a site like Elite Daily has now proven to be at best very risky and at worst extremely dumb.”

Adam Thomas | The coming collaboration across Europe | “European media will develop a common vocabulary to test, measure and analyze the diversity and impact of our coverage, newsrooms, and stories.”

Amie Ferris-Rotman | Вслед за Россией | “In September, I returned to Moscow, this time with The Wall Street Journal, only to find fake news sites and ‘stories’ more sophisticated and streamlined than before.”

Andrew Haeg | The year of listening | “Our addiction to scale and its primary fuel, social media, have created the illusion of expanding reach while actually eroding what made us indispensable in the first place: our role as trusted guides to a rapidly changing world.”

Dhiya Kuriakose | The year of digital detoxing | “We can no longer take comfort in creating second-screen experiences. We need to find meaningful space on primary screens with reduced time available.”

Ernst-Jan Pfauth | Earn trust by working for (and with) readers | “I’m not surprised that audiences think journalism’s highest aim is to hijack their attention and trick their eyeballs into spending a split second on banner ads.”

Julia Beizer | Building a coherent core identity | “Our consumers know us by the design choices we make, the frequency and character of our push alerts, what we do on social, how we monetize, how we market, and which technologies and platforms we choose to pursue.”

Eric Nuzum | Podcasting stratifies into hard layers | “My fear is that the ecosystem we have invested in all these years will start to resemble the vanity publishing marketplace or the guy selling CDs out of the trunk of his car after gigs: a place that’s easy to publish into, but rarely yields a significant audience.”

Michael Kuntz | Trust is the new click | “The major social networks have struggled to build trust over the last year, and the passive programmatic machine lurking in the background is, by its very nature, anonymous.”

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen | News after advertising may look like news before advertising | “The link between advertising and news that has for so long provided so much of the money invested in professional journalism is coming apart.”

Maria Bustillos | “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook” | “When my cousins’ Facebook timelines make no meaningful distinction between fact-checked magazine stories and flat-out lies from an AdSense scammer or a Fox News propagandist, the means by which meaningful public discourse can happen isn’t only damaged, it’s broken.”

Dannagal G. Young | The return of the gatekeepers | “Walter Lippmann was right. There is no substitute for experts in a field, parsing information and serving as the arbiters of truth, and reifying our faith in a shared reality, a shared body of facts.”

Francesco Marconi | The year of augmented writing | “The combination of AI and journalism will contribute to a more informed and efficient society by enabling journalists to conduct deep analysis, uncover corruption, and hold people and institutions accountable.”

Keren Goldshlager | Defining a focus, and then saying no | “In 2017, the publishers that optimize for quality of content over quantity of clicks will earn the loyalty — and the business — of readers. Their audiences may be smaller, but they’ll be more valuable.”

Sara M. Watson | There is no neutral interface | “What are we optimizing for? Is it for civic responsibility? Personal relevance? Quality? Truthiness? Diversity of sources and viewpoints? Time on site? Time well spent?”

Bill Keller | A healthy skepticism about data | “Political journalism used to be more like anthropology — relying on field work, on long, in-depth interviews. I fear that kind of reporting is now regarded as ‘anecdotal.'”

Tressie McMillan Cottom | A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis | “Democratized platforms have not always respected how much people crave expertise, even as they resent it.”

Felix Salmon | Headlines matter | “Even with the best-crafted headline in the world, for every person who clicks on it, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who see it, digest it, and simply move on. People get their news from headlines now in a way they never did in the past.”

Rachel Schallom | Stop flying over the flyover states | “We have to stop thinking of these people as subjects we cover and relate to them as neighbors, friends, and readers we make journalism for.”

Richard Tofel | The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us | “Where are the people getting their negative impressions of their new leader? They are getting them from the same press they say they do not trust.”

Liz Danzico | The triumph of the small | “Rather than retreating into making or craft, we will retreat into smaller and more nuanced connections. Into quality over quantity. Into the single story over collections of stories. Into the subtle over the general.”

Anita Zielina | The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom | “The second click is when it starts to become interesting: A user that we attracted wants to get more of our content, our service.”