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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Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

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Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

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David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

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Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

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

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

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

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

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

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

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

AX Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

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

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

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

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

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

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Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

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Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

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Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

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