As I write this, thousands of people are being evacuated from their homes in Aleppo, while many more thousands remain trapped in the city, fearing imminent death, in a country in which hundreds of thousands have been killed over the last five years. I am crying. I am thinking of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, photographed a few months ago sitting bloodied and silent in the back of an ambulance, not much older than my precious, so very lucky daughter. And then I am recalling a clip I saw in my Facebook news feed this summer, of CNN’s Kate Bolduan, her voice cracking as she reported on little Omran.
In 2017, I think we will see more of this. We will see more suffering, not all of it far away, and we will see more journalists reveal how it affects them. Sometimes the revelations will be inadvertent, but not always. Sometimes they will be intentional, like WNCN anchor Sean Maroney’s, after three young Muslim Americans were shot by a neighbor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 2015. (If you haven’t seen his raw, emotional statement, go watch it now. It is context. It is connection. It is community. And as an audience member, I craved it more deeply than I realized.)
In 2016, we talked a lot about what audiences need in order to trust us. In 2017, maybe we’ll start to see that for many people, especially those who rarely see their full humanity represented in the news, a sense of a journalist’s humanity can help.
Umbreen Bhatti is product manager at the KQED Lab.
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
David Weigel A test for online speech
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Richard J. Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Andy Rossback The year of the user
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”