This is going to sound darker than it is, but this is my general take on digital media after 2016: Forests need to burn to regrow.
Layoffs are terrible. Endings are gutting. But the drive for scale has made so many places way, way too big. And there just aren’t enough good jobs to keep everyone working, satisfied, succeeding.
So what’s going to happen in 2017?
Prediction No. 1: Some digital nomads, young, middle-aged, and old, will leave journalism altogether and go into different industries. In the last month, I’ve talked to a number of laid-off and/or miserable writers and editors tired of jumping from promising digital news upstart (or well-funded expansion/reinvention) to the next. In each case, the same cycle is repeated: investment, growth, the hiring of writers with big social footprints (to bring their followers — which, by the way, is not how a brand grows an audience!), the setting of impossible metrics, demands to increase video views. STOP! Change of strategy, layoffs, reassignments, re-orgs, possible sale or IPO, lose/change identity.
I’ve been through this cycle myself four times in the past six years. Based on my own experience, you can get through between 9 and 18 months before the end of what you built is clearly near. And by “end” I don’t mean that your company is going out of business — it’s just going to try and reinvent itself, already and again. The second you get going on one strategy, the directive comes to shift, your colleagues (and possibly you) are out of work, and all you have to show are a few good stories, a successful experiment or two, some unhappy and anxious writers you are begging to post three times a day, and a whole bunch of frustration.
The writers and editors I talked to are exhausted by this hamster wheel — even if they are in their 20s! So, in this new Trump world, they are contemplating nonprofits, city council jobs, labor-organizing jobs, LSATs. The same thing that drove them into journalism — the desire to do good work that has impact on the world we live in — will drive them out of the industry that, in their own instances, has ceased to value their contributions, or give them a runway to success.
Prediction No. 2: Some of these journalists will end up in the agency world. The work, of course, will be called content, not journalism. But agencies will make things that aren’t ads that have news value and that change the way we look at the world. This may be more relevant for film and video journalists than print — at first. But that won’t last. These ex-journalists will play with forms, and ways of storytelling, and do it outside the pressures of a newsroom. And my guess is they will have fun, too.
(Note: What’s wrong with the newsroom anyway?, you ask. Well, somehow, despite building more collaborative, open spaces with no offices and glass walls, we still function as siloed institutions where it’s almost impossible to develop ideas across specialties. Reporters still don’t know their counterparts in design, or development. The C-suite execs may have weekly staff meetings where they find things they are doing in their own areas dovetail, but the bulk of people charged with coming up with ideas don’t have ways to talk to one another, inspire one another, create with one another. Slack is great, but it’s not a cure-all. Some companies have tried to address these issues with interdisciplinary task forces to take on certain projects, or brainstorm ideas, etc. But they never last. People have day jobs, responsibilities, to achieve scale. And a task force is always just an add-on of time suckage that no one wants to prioritize — especially the brass, who want the clicks. Get back to your desk! This has to change. Innovation can’t just happen in the “innovation” group. And we can’t just make beautiful open physical spaces and expect proximity to do the work, either.)
Prediction No. 3: Voices will realize they don’t need big media to make a living. By “voices” I mean those writers with huge social footprints desired by every scale outlet in the country. They may make brand deals. They may find VC investment in specific projects and ideas, or do an angel round to start a newsletter. They may find a nonprofit to fund their trip to Iraq, and a studio to help cut the pilot for their video series. They could meet a rich person at a dinner party, and that person could write them a check! They will value creative control of their voice, copyright, and ideas over a 360˚ big-ticket deal that sounds amazing and pays them enough to go on a nice vacation but prevents them from ever getting anything done the way they want. Because they still answer to the (white) man.
These voices will change the media world in the process, and show the next generation that they can chart their own paths, too. They will go step by step, and will listen to the desires of their followers and, hopefully, support one another. And more startups looking to seed ideas, to develop them and shape them, will pop up to support these creators, too, and help turn their best dreams into sustainable realities that can nurture a wider, more diverse world of great stories, and fuck with old, dead models in the process.
2016 sucked, and 2017 is going to be a rough year. But at the end, things we didn’t expect will grow. And journalists, even working in different industries, will do important work. And that will be beautiful.
Hillary Frey is co-chief creative officer at Matter Studios.
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Andy Rossback The year of the user
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
David Weigel A test for online speech
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Carrie Brown We won’t do enough
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state