A healthy skepticism about data

“Political journalism used to be more like anthropology — relying on field work, on long, in-depth interviews. I fear that kind of reporting is now regarded as ‘anecdotal.'”

bill-kellerThis is more wishful thinking than prediction: Journalists, chastened by their failure to see the Trump victory coming, will gain a healthy skepticism about data. Political journalism used to be more like anthropology — relying on field work, on long, in-depth interviews. I fear that kind of reporting is now regarded as “anecdotal.” Okay, you filled a notebook with soul-baring interviews, but where are the metrics? The metrics of 2016 — unreliable polls, economic indicators that told us things were getting better (never mind the back end of the bell curve), low crime rates that don’t measure fear — didn’t tell the story. I’m all for data, but we shouldn’t be slaves to it.

Bill Keller is editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project and previously executive editor of The New York Times.

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

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

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

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

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

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

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

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

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

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

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

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

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

David Weigel   A test for online speech

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

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Trushar Barot   API or die

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

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

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up