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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Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

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

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

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

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Trushar Barot   API or die

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

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

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

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

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

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

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

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

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

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

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state