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.
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Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
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Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
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Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
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Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
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Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
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Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
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Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
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Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
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Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
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Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
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Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
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Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
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Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
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Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
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Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
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David Chavern Fake news gets solved
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Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
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Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
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Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
David Weigel A test for online speech
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
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Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
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Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
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Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
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Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
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Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
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Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data