Chaos or community?

“Newsrooms must hire decision-makers, not just reporters, who are reflective of the communities we cover.”

The 2016 presidential election exposed racial fault lines to reveal a deeply fractured country, with citizens who are strangers to one another. We’ve been here before, but what will we say now about race in America?

errin-whackFor some, the work will be what it has always been: attempting to right wrongs by telling the stories of the unseen and unheard. We know now that must also include white people — but not only the ones at the center of the Recent Unpleasantness.

While much has been made about the angry Rust Belt voters we did not know, there was another group we failed to cover — the voters we did know: our neighbors, friends and relatives who made choices we didn’t expect or, according to the polls, didn’t believe they would on Election Day. Talking to them could also yield new insights, if we’re ready to lay down old assumptions. And with renewed interest in the “inner city” — expressed by the president-elect on the campaign trail — must come a renewed commitment to journalism that takes a view of these communities that is more focused on their humanity than body counts.

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 race riots that roiled cities like Newark, Detroit, and Cleveland. In their wake, the country asked how and why racial tensions exploded after years of unrest and in the wake of some racial progress. The result of that inquiry was the Kerner Report, commissioned the same year by President Lyndon Johnson. Completed in 1968, the report described a nation “moving toward two societies…separate and unequal.”

Its lessons remain salient, urgent, and befitting the moment as we ponder America’s next chapter and the future of our country’s journalism. Among them: to show up in communities, and not just in times of crisis; to report on the daily lives of minorities in a way that normalizes them to the rest of America; and that newsrooms must hire decision-makers, not just reporters, who are reflective of the communities we cover.

Errin Haines Whack covers urban affairs for the Associated Press.

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

AX Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

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

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Carrie Brown   We won’t do enough

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

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

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

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

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Trushar Barot   API or die

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

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

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

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

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

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

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

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

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

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