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.
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Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
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Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
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Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
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Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
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Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
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Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
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Rachel Sklar Women are going to get loud
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Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
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Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
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Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
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David Chavern Fake news gets solved
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
AX Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Nathalie Malinarich Making it easy
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
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Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Andy Rossback The year of the user
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Swati Sharma Failing diversity is failing journalism
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
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