There is no neutral interface

“What are we optimizing for? Is it for civic responsibility? Personal relevance? Quality? Truthiness? Diversity of sources and viewpoints? Time on site? Time well spent?”

Whether you get your news direct from publications and their apps, or through Google, Facebook, or news aggregating apps, access points to information are increasingly personalized. That is, there is no neutral experience, no standard editorial vision for above-the-fold importance.

Based on observed and tracked previous behaviors, personalization and recommendation systems make a lot of assumptions about users’ interests and intentions.

The key question for readers and filtering interfaces will be: What are we optimizing for? Is it for civic responsibility? Personal relevance? Quality? Truthiness? Diversity of sources and viewpoints? Time on site? Time well spent?

As a response to the increasing awareness of the filter bubble problem, we may start to see third-party services allowing consumers to subscribe to a third-party filter proxy, reflecting their preference and intended optimization strategy, rather than a generic optimization algorithm. This kind of editorial outsourcing may be one of Facebook’s only options, should it continue to eschew classification as media company and arbiter of content.

Sara M. Watson is a technology critic and affiliated with Digital Asia Hub, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

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

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

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

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

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

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

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

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Trushar Barot   API or die

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

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

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

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

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

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

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

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones