Time to pay up

“Websites and email newsletters will remain the two most important tools for independent news publishing and distribution, three decades running.”

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.

mark-armstrong2. 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.

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

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

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

AX Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

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

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

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

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Trushar Barot   API or die

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

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

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

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

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

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

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

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

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

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

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news