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