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