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