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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Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

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Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

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Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

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Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

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Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

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Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

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Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

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Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

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Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

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Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

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

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

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

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Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

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

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

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Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

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Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

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Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

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