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?
Here’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.
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
David Weigel A test for online speech
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls