The people running the media are the problem

“It’s the safest prediction I could make beyond the sun coming up in the morning: You won’t fix this.”

This month, I spent a week surrounded by bright, well-meaning journalism and tech thinkers. Session after session, day after day, conversations kept coming back to these questions: How do we restore trust in media? How do we reach Middle America? What do we do about fake news?

matt-waiteHere’s my prediction for 2017. It’s the safest prediction I could make beyond the sun coming up in the morning. It’s aimed right at the people who run news organizations.

You won’t fix this. Any of this. Not in 2017. Not soon.

You won’t fix trust in news because…

You won’t fix how news gets made because…

You won’t fix how you hire senior leadership to diversify your thinking because…

You won’t fix what stories are selected because…

You won’t change who you hire to do the stories because…

You won’t fix the ways that stories are written to be more transparent and more directly sourced to give people a reason to trust you because…

You won’t fix the lack of training in newsrooms that could retrain reporters to source stories more explicitly because…

You won’t fix the content management systems to require sourcing on stories to be transparent and structured and visible because…

You won’t fix the technology leadership in the company because…

You won’t fix the thinking that makes you believe you’re not a technology company because…

You won’t fix the belief that trust and fake news is Google and Facebook’s problems and not yours because…

You still don’t believe you’re the problem.

Wake me when you do.

Matt Waite is founder of the Drone Journalism Lab and a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska.

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Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Carrie Brown   We won’t do enough

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

AX Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

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Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Trushar Barot   API or die

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

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David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

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