Social will get smarter

• New newsgathering tools for social media will be developed. There may be new alert systems for breaking stories, improved contact suggestions, and better recommendations for Twitter lists. Some of these features will be launched by Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, but many will come from third-party platforms.
• Visual content will continue to do well on social. News organizations will invest increasing amounts of time and creativity in posting videos, images, and interactives directly to social platforms.
• News sites will find new ways to use social media to surface stories from the archives and extend the lifecycle of content.
• News organizations will learn from social media and offer readers more personalized alerts. They will find ways to creatively curate content and tailor it to reader preferences.
• News sites will continue to experiment with microvideo, telling stories in 15 seconds on Instagram and six seconds on Vine.

Mobile will get smarter

• News organizations will find new ways of turning news and information into a utility for mobile.
• Mobile geolocation information will be better used to push out relevant news stories to readers and to aid journalists in newsgathering.
• More than half of social traffic to news sites will be mobile in 2014. According to a study by analytics platform Chartbeat, a quarter of traffic to news sites was on mobile in October 2013, but for many sites more than 40 percent of social traffic was mobile. The tipping point will be 2014, when more than 50 percent of social traffic will be mobile.