A great wave of disruption — anchored in artificial intelligence, robotics, cognitive computing, and big data — is underway. As these technologies move from the fringe to the mainstream, they promise to forever change how news organizations work and what we think of as journalism.
In 2017, a critical mass of emerging technologies will start to converge, finding advanced uses beyond initial testing and applied research. That’s a signal worth paying attention to. Rather than focusing on digital media, technology and journalism alone, I would encourage you think like a futurist, and to look far afield to gain perspective on your year ahead.
Our annual report lists 159 tech trends for the coming year, and a few dozen of them are devoted to news, media and publishing. Here are eight highlights:
Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL have trained computers to not only recognize what’s in a video, but to predict what humans will do next. Trained on YouTube videos and TV shows such as The Office and Desperate Housewives, a computer system can now predict whether two people are likely to hug, kiss, shake hands, or slap a high five. This research will someday enable robots to more easily navigate human environments — and to interact with us humans by taking cues from our own body language. Soon, this kind of technology will enable news organizations to automatically compile video news stories without the direct involvement of human journalists.
In short, an adversarial image is a photo with a tiny modification, usually one that’s imperceptible to humans, that is created in order to help computer scientists adjust machine learning models. In order for machine learning systems to learn, they must recognize subtle differences. For example, a computer scientist might slightly alter an image of a llama — using something as tiny as a few scattered pixels — and fool the system into miscategorizing the image as something completely different, such as a shoe or a cup of coffee. When that happens, an adjustment is made to the system and it continues training. Adversarial images can also be used to knowingly and purposely trick a machine learning system. If an attacker trains a model, using very slightly altered images, the adversarial examples could then be deployed out into other models. There are implications for any service that automatically tags our photos, such as Google and Facebook, and every news organization that distributes content through them.
Some organizations have begun to experiment with temporary products: limited-run newsletters, podcasts that only last a set number of episodes, live SMS offerings that happen only during events. In 2017, expect to see more temporary podcasts, newsletters, and chatbots that are deployed specifically for just one event. This is a revenue and outreach opportunity, as they are vehicles for targeted, short-run advertising.
“Software as a service” is a licensing and delivery model, where users pay for on-demand access. It’s a trend I’m seeing in other industry sectors (health care, retail) and it’s a model that I believe could work for news. In fact, in the near future, it might just be an inevitability.
The central challenge within news organizations is that there are immediate, acute problems — but reasonable solutions will require long-term investment in energy and capital. The tension between the two always results in short-term fixes, like swapping out micro-paywalls for site-wide paywalls. In a sense, this is analogous to making interest-only payments on a loan, without paying down the principal. Failing to pay down the principal means that debt — that problem — sticks around longer. It doesn’t ever go away.
Transitioning to “journalism as a service” would enable news organizations to fully realize their value to everyone working in the knowledge economy — universities, legal startups, data science companies, businesses, hospitals, and even big tech giants. News organizations that archive their content are sitting on an enormous corpus — data that can be structured, cleaned, and used by numerous other groups. How could you rethink news deployed as a service that would include different kinds of parcels: news stories; vetted and fact-checked mini-biographies for other sites and digital services (to replace Wikipedia); verified, searchable databases of people and organizations. An AI-powered service that automatically generates a short report of the opinions on a particular subject, along with a list of quoted experts. A calendar plugin that summarizes the most important news events to pay attention to during the week. All of these services could work outside of the social media landscape, which means that news organizations would not have to share revenue or give away their content for free, but could charge for access.
We are entering an era of conversational interfaces. You can be expected to talk to machines for the rest of your life. We’re already surrounded by conversational interfaces: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s watch and phone interface (“OK Google”), among others. Conversational interfaces can simulate the conversations that a reporter might have with her editor, as she talks through the facts of a story. Bottable interfaces and platforms, such as Pandorabots and Chatfuel, will start to replace standard search and FAQs. Meanwhile, journalists will engage in conversations with machines to assist in reporting. IBM Watson’s various APIs, including Visual Recognition, Alchemy Language, Conversation, and Tone Analyzer can all be used to assist reporters with their work.
What happens when a government leaks a cache of sensitive information on WikiLeaks, with the intent of destabilizing another nation? WikiLeaks becomes weaponized. In July 2016, WikiLeaks published 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee. By fall, the Obama administration named Russia as the source of the hacked data, citing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire to influence the U.S. presidential election. Given the rising political and social tensions within the U.S., Europe, Russia and Middle East, we’re forecasting more leaks in the coming year. This presents some new challenges for news organizations. To start, we’ve only ever had one major leak happen at once. What happens when leaking starts to scale? Are news organizations prepared to investigate multiple leaks at the same time? What ethical considerations will need to be considered, given the current political climate? Better to make plans and decisions now, rather than under duress.
“Doxing” is mining and publishing personal information about a person — organizational doxing is when this happens to an entire company. It’s a term introduced by security expert Bruce Schneier. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, we’ve seen a number of data dumps. WikiLeaks has published troves of data. Hackers broke into Hacking Team, publishing a massive amount of internal data. Sony has been breached, and so have various branches of the U.S. government. This isn’t about stealing credit card information, but rather about making public the personal details of individuals, either to protest against policies, to embarrass companies or to blackmail companies into paying big ransoms to hackers. Because of the success hackers had in 2016, we can expect more organizational doxing in the year ahead. Every single news rganization ought to shore up security and to develop a risk management plan should they find themselves doxed. I strongly recommend reading the “Organizational Doxing and Disinformation” blog post by Bruce Schneier.
Let’s be clear — it’s not because of the recent U.S. election that people suddenly developed this idea of fake news. And it isn’t just election-related fake news that’s being created. Humans have been spreading misinformation since we were first grunting at each other in caves. Fake news is a bigger and more complicated problem than most of us realize. One of the challenges has to do with data: What’s fake to one person may seem very real to someone else. As every research scientist knows, even empirical data is still subject to outside interpretation once a project is reported in the media or talked about by non-scientists. And that’s compounded in this age of social media. We have machine learning algorithms that are just performing their prescribed functions — deliver us content that we’re likely to click on. Six years ago, we at FTI forecasted that this would be an emerging problem. I recommended to a consortium of newspapers that they develop a verification system — a simple line of code — that would travel digitally wherever the news story did. At the time, there wasn’t yet a critical mass of problematic stories as we’re now seeing today, and without an immediate need they didn’t feel a sense of urgency. I hope they feel the urgency now.
Amy Webb is founder of the Future Today Institute and author of The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Future Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream.
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
David Weigel A test for online speech
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight