1. We will all finally accept Facebook for what it is — a nice place to share photos of family and friends and pets, a handy marketing tool, and a fragmented echo chamber that is inhospitable to public service journalism.
2. The news media will get more serious about subscriptions. Financial support from readers will be even more necessary to help protect them from government intervention and from new legal threats by aggrieved billionaires with fragile egos.
3. Those who simply play the viral content game will find themselves left out of the next era — where we must get more serious about the journalism we do, and why we do it, or the world’s readers will cast us off as unnecessary and pointless.
4. Some smart person will develop a WordPress plugin for creating Twitter threads on a blog and syndicating them, one-by-one, to Twitter.
5. Newspaper businesses will continue to consolidate, but still produce outstanding work with the resources they have. Fledgling digital news sites will launch, some startups will fold, and the last ones standing will be the ones you directly support with your money. (See No. 2, above.)
6. Websites and email newsletters will remain the two most important tools for independent news publishing and distribution, three decades running.
Mark Armstrong is the founder of Longreads and editor at Automattic & WordPress.com.
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
David Weigel A test for online speech
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism