This month, I spent a week surrounded by bright, well-meaning journalism and tech thinkers. Session after session, day after day, conversations kept coming back to these questions: How do we restore trust in media? How do we reach Middle America? What do we do about fake news?
Here’s my prediction for 2017. It’s the safest prediction I could make beyond the sun coming up in the morning. It’s aimed right at the people who run news organizations.
You won’t fix this. Any of this. Not in 2017. Not soon.
You won’t fix trust in news because…
You won’t fix how news gets made because…
You won’t fix how you hire senior leadership to diversify your thinking because…
You won’t fix what stories are selected because…
You won’t change who you hire to do the stories because…
You won’t fix the ways that stories are written to be more transparent and more directly sourced to give people a reason to trust you because…
You won’t fix the lack of training in newsrooms that could retrain reporters to source stories more explicitly because…
You won’t fix the content management systems to require sourcing on stories to be transparent and structured and visible because…
You won’t fix the technology leadership in the company because…
You won’t fix the thinking that makes you believe you’re not a technology company because…
You won’t fix the belief that trust and fake news is Google and Facebook’s problems and not yours because…
You still don’t believe you’re the problem.
Wake me when you do.
Matt Waite is founder of the Drone Journalism Lab and a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska.
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
David Weigel A test for online speech
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers