Predictions for Journalism 2017

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.”
        
  • That new Jim VandeHei joint, Axios, won’t be the only new media venture premised on the notion that “people who care about real news are now a niche” we’ll see in the coming year. Several companies, some new and some already in existence, will probably push deeper into structurally differentiating between intelligence, information, news, and content, and they’ll price accordingly. The outcome will likely be a worsening of knowledge inequality.

    • nick-quah

  • Digital video will continue to drive the conversation around growth, innovation, and survival as it pertains to media organizations. The medium will finally establish itself as the unambiguous principal commodity that flows between the pipes that make up the #content ecosystem that ties all our mobile devices together. Where digital video will increasingly look like water, every other format in the visual realm — particularly television — will be forced deeper into a position where the move would be to position themselves more as wine: more prestige branding, more niches, smaller audiences, higher prices. It will become increasingly ambiguous whether this strategy will yield any significant national-cultural impact, but on the bright side, a contextual line will have been drawn between commodity and high-quality good.
  • Someone’s going to try and make the argument that print magazines are the new vinyl. Shade will be thrown, but quietly, hope is kindled among some.
  • Rent prices will continue to go up in New York — not a prediction, a certainty — and that will further ensure only a certain type of young person will get media jobs. Meanwhile, in certain cities throughout the country (particularly the ones with some considerable inflow of tech money and tech workers, and probably also college towns), some enterprising young person is going to wonder out loud: “Say, wouldn’t it be a good idea to start an email newsletter covering the city?”
  • Oh, and because I cover the podcast industry for my day job: Podcasting is going to further formalize at the emerging professionalizing layer, and the bulk of advertising growth will be captured at the top. Value will not trickle down, gains will not be equally spread. 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.

Nicholas Quah writes Hot Pod.

Each year, Nieman Lab asks some of the smartest people in journalism what they think is coming in the new year. Here are their predictions for 2017.
See the full list →

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

AX Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Trushar Barot   API or die

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Updating through December 19
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