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