It’s impossible to discuss what 2017 will bring for media without considering how this election has rocked assumptions about journalism’s relationship with both the public and those in power. On November 9, many people found themselves questioning how they had failed to see the scale of support behind Donald Trump. How could it be, when their visible universe was full of convincingly critical articles and friends who were dismayed and dismissive? Alternately, those who supported Trump found his victory obvious, given how thoroughly Clinton had been discredited according to every article they read and every conversation they had.
Call it peak filter bubble: 2016 saw the transition from what was held to be a commonly shared public reality to an extremely walled-off, divided set of micro-realities that never see or speak to one another.
While there’s been discussion about the impact of filter bubbles for years, it still came as a shock to see just how completely splintered our realities have become. How can journalism act as a public service when there is no “public” to serve, only a set of increasingly private spaces that are largely invisible to one another?
In 2017, we will see the media struggle with this splintering, to re-establish a broad public trust and a shared reality. There is a clear need for news sources that readers across the political spectrum can trust, in order to facilitate a constructive exchange of ideas. However, many believe that the traditional approach to “unbiased” reporting has led us into a world of false equivalence that does the public a disservice in communicating underlying truths. There is also a perception that “covering both sides equally” requires good faith by all parties, a good faith that has often been broken. In addition, even the most even-handed reporting can be seen as biased simply due to a reader’s belief about a publisher’s political leanings.
So how do we engender public trust? Some news organizations will bend over backward to become even more unbiased, mollifying their critics at every turn and becoming increasingly risk-averse. Others are moving in the other direction, calling for journalists to be truth-tellers regardless of whether that truth makes people angry. Both of these paths are imperfect. The first can lead to journalism that is unable to act as a check on the powerful because it is afraid to offend. The second may tell truths that no one will hear, except those who already believe them.
One of the causes of this fraught situation is the dire state of media literacy. Fake and inaccurate news proliferates not only because people want to believe it, but also because they have no methods for knowing how to assess the veracity of what they read or watch. That problem is furthered by the growth of distributed platforms for news consumption — Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, and others serve to flatten the visibility of sources and publishers and to give an air of legitimacy to all comers. At a time when media literacy is at an all-time low, these platforms actually strip away the few tools we had to distinguish reliable sources from hacks. One of the most effective things we may aspire to do in 2017 is to find ways to make journalism more legible and interrogable, to make our ethical standards and reporting processes clear and evident. Some of these tools for media literacy may be purely editorial and some may quite literally be tools — technological and design solutions for probing deeper, viewing source material, fact-checking, ascertaining a publisher’s interests, and more.
The answers aren’t clear, but the questions that will shape 2017 are. They certainly inform the goals that are at the heart of Axios, which I joined this past summer. Our mission is to report information and analysis in a clear and straightforward way that engenders broad public trust. A large part of that is considering the needs of our readers foremost in everything we do; serving them first in a media landscape where their trust is often considered secondary to the demands of advertisers or the habits of legacy organizations. We will also be experimenting with editorial, technology, and design approaches to find ways of making those ethics legible to our readers.
It is a year of reckoning for the news media, one in which the trends and pressures of the last two decades of digital culture come to a head. Hopefully it is a reckoning that will lead to a reimagining of the media’s relationship with both government and the governed, a reckoning that will re-establish the power of journalism to provide sense-making and truth in an increasingly fractured reality.
Alexis Lloyd is chief design officer at Axios.
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Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
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Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
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Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
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Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
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Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
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Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
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Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
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Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
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Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
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Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
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Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
David Weigel A test for online speech
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Richard J. Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions