A prediction is always a commentary on the current situation in disguise, but this year, our disguise won’t fool anyone. So bear with us as we pretend to say something about the future that is pretty much about the present, and, even worse, as we try to find some answers in the past.
As everyone interested in journalism, we will enter in 2017 with a deep concern: During the past few months, news media have acutely failed to triumph over disinformation, fake news, and rumors. One of the central tenets of journalism — that a news report must be somehow related to something real, to facts that actually exist in the world — has been wiped out with such ease and nonchalance that it still seems incredible. Is that all there is? Nobody cares about facts? What is real or not doesn’t matter, at all? That failure has happened despite recent or long-lasting trends that made us believe that journalism was well equipped to inform citizens with facts. You name it: data-driven reporting, fact-checking, precision journalism, visualizations, political calculus with Nate Silveresque brio…all these exciting and innovative practices that were supposed to push journalism towards more accuracy.
Facing such a deep epistemological crisis, journalism could try to do more of the same, and work hard on an improved version of what Daniel Kreiss has labeled “administrative journalism.” More facts, more dots on the chart, more experts, more granular maps, more polls, more data, better data — all expected to inform rationally-minded citizens. But the risk of having quality and high-precision journalism about which nobody cares seems greater than ever. During Brexit or the Trump campaign, plenty of excellent journalism with excellent facts was available, just a few clicks away. But being available wasn’t enough; what was lacking was a public interested in those facts — a real democratic public, one that is actively constituted around issues and concerned by those issues. Consequently, we need to take a deep look into the current epistemological abyss and, at least partially, accept that news media exist in a world where showing the facts, just the facts, is not enough. Among other things, accepting that could mean that in 2017, populist journalism needs to be reinvented.
Populism is a nasty word. But its primary meaning — working in the interest of the people instead of that of the elite — is not horrific. Populist journalism, and even quality populist journalism, has existed in the past. The muckrakers of the Progressive Era perfectly exemplify that: Their reporting was sensational and rabidly adversarial, politically engaged with a reformist agenda — going against the grain of what would become the dominant ideal of “objective journalism” in the 1920s — but for all that, they didn’t disregard facts. Their populist reporting style was close to the interest and language of the working-class people, but that is not incompatible with accuracy, verification, and facticity. Actually, muckrakers cared for more than pieces of information. Their “exposés” not only unveiled facts, but also stories.
Recent comments about the outlook that the Trump presidency brings to journalism have gloomily argued that facts are out of fashion, because what matters is the story. Don’t worry about the truth, the rationale goes, and just trust another gut-wrenching narrative. That disconnect between facts and stories, however, is not necessary, as the muckraking movement shows. Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraker, was fascinated by facts to such an extent that he wanted to push facticity to its highest degree. His whole career, during the first decades of the 1900s, was a pursuit of what he called “scientific journalism.” Did that mean some arid, quantified, bare-naked version of journalism full of data points and percentages of fact-checked truth? Quite the opposite, as Steffens simply wrote stories which were griping and entertaining, sensational and concerned with social justice. His obsession for scientific journalism took the shape of an interest in “systems” and “patterns” — that is, going beyond individual facts and instead looking for relations between those facts. A story, in his view, is achieved when facts are assembled within relations.
In his own way, Steffens achieved what John Dewey and Franklin Ford, only a few years before, envisioned to be the role of journalism. In a document written in 1893 that sketches an ambitious (and unattainable) project of a countrywide news system, the philosopher (Dewey) and the journalist (Ford) describe journalism as the “organized movement of the whole intelligence or fact.” The registration of life through newspapers is not enough, they argue; facts have to be put within relations in what they extravagantly call the “movement of intelligence.” By doing so, journalism would be able to reach the dissatisfied public, as this holistic approach that weaves facts into broader stories is simply dazzling — “We recover the true meaning of the word sensational now obscured by the falsely sensational. We undertake to be sensational to the last degree. It is, of course, only possible to compete with the present ‘sensational’ newspapers by being more sensational than they. Getting back to the true meaning of things it is seen that the craving for sensation on the part of the public is the demand for intelligence itself.” In Dewey and Ford’s view, the sensational is achieved when journalism draws connections between people and society, between the “integrity of the social body” and “the welfare of the individual,” between isolated facts and an all-encompassing inquiry: “the local fact is everywhere dealt within the light of the whole, thus compelling the highest sensations.”
Steffens fully realized that he himself was part of a larger political and economic “system” that was corrupted. Identifying with ordinary people, he considered his task to assemble facts into stories that were compelling and challenging for the system. He wrote pieces about rigged city government and corruption in Wall Street that brought change to the system. Of course, looking at Steffens today, it’s easy to paint a picture of muckrakers as honest reformists and brilliant storytellers only concerned with the truth — a naive and misleading picture of a glorified past, as Steffens himself or muckraking in general need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But if there’s one thing that 2017 could hope to emulate, it’s the muckrakers’ ability to produce journalism that is genuinely concerned with the interest of the people, fiercely adversarial but never personalized (fighting corruption is not about replacing one man, Steffens believed, but about understanding the system), and obsessed with connecting facts together into a broader inquiry. In a way, Steffens’s fight against corruption echoes with what is so worrying at the dawn of 2017: a criticism of the elite that blends way too easily in conspiracy theories and hate of “the system.” A populist journalism could try to channel the public’s appetite for such criticism, by instead contributing to the understanding of the system, with reform and change in mind. In Dewey and Ford’s words, journalism could then relentlessly remind us that “the social fact is the sensational thing.”
Juliette De Maeyer is an assistant professor at the Université de Montréal. Dominique Trudel is a researcher at CNRS in France.
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
David Weigel A test for online speech
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe