In 2015, I predicted that this would be the year news organizations needed to get their ethical houses in order to build trust with audiences. “It doesn’t matter how much content they post on Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter — if users don’t trust journalists, they won’t buy what news outlets are selling.”
It remains true today. But until and unless news organizations figure out how to build trusting relationships with users, nothing will change.
Currently, most — if not all — news organizations struggle to figure out who their existing users are, and they aren’t even close to knowing who their potential users are. What’s worse is that users don’t know us either, and many don’t seem to care. News organizations have been indifferent toward communities and audiences for so long that now communities and audiences are indifferent toward us.
So how do we fix this?
It’s all about relationships. Building them takes time, is expensive and is made even more difficult by the lack of trust between the American public and news organizations. Still, if anything is to change for the better in 2017, this is where we’ll have to start.
Happy New Year! Here’s to healthy relationship building in 2017.
Tracie Powell is founder of AllDigitocracy and a senior fellow with the Democracy Fund.
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Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
David Weigel A test for online speech
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
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