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.
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
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
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
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
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 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
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