1. We will all finally accept Facebook for what it is — a nice place to share photos of family and friends and pets, a handy marketing tool, and a fragmented echo chamber that is inhospitable to public service journalism.
2. The news media will get more serious about subscriptions. Financial support from readers will be even more necessary to help protect them from government intervention and from new legal threats by aggrieved billionaires with fragile egos.
3. Those who simply play the viral content game will find themselves left out of the next era — where we must get more serious about the journalism we do, and why we do it, or the world’s readers will cast us off as unnecessary and pointless.
4. Some smart person will develop a WordPress plugin for creating Twitter threads on a blog and syndicating them, one-by-one, to Twitter.
5. Newspaper businesses will continue to consolidate, but still produce outstanding work with the resources they have. Fledgling digital news sites will launch, some startups will fold, and the last ones standing will be the ones you directly support with your money. (See No. 2, above.)
6. Websites and email newsletters will remain the two most important tools for independent news publishing and distribution, three decades running.
Mark Armstrong is the founder of Longreads and editor at Automattic & WordPress.com.
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Richard J. Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
David Chavern Fake news gets solved
David Weigel A test for online speech
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media