Show your work

“After several years of listening to journalism’s sages talk about how important it is that we more explicitly explain our processes, we’re finally going to get serious about doing just that.”

Media trust flows partly from transparency — or so the thinking goes. This coming year will be a good one to test that theory, as news organizations dramatically ramp up their efforts to be more open about how they do what they do, and invest energy in transparency’s broader corollary, news literacy.

Trustworthy news organizations follow pretty similar ethics codes. They clearly identify the sources of their information, to the extent possible. They make timely and prominent corrections; they disclose any conflicts of interest, and they tell people who funds their work.

We’ve been assuming all along that most of our listeners and readers and viewers are aware of the best practices that underpin our work. But this past year, it became increasingly apparent that they aren’t, and they are susceptible to counter-arguments designed to discredit us. So in 2018, after several years of listening to journalism’s sages talk about how important it is that we more explicitly explain our processes, we’re finally going to get serious about doing just that.

These actions may be as straightforward as putting a bug on our work to quickly signal our values to news consumers. Or as elaborate as a six-minute video explaining how a big story came about. Audiences are yearning for this information: Last June, nearly 900 people turned out one evening to hear Colorado Public Radio and NPR journalists talk about media ethics and debate how newsroom decisions are made.

Attitudes change slowly. Trust in media has finally started ticking up, ever so slightly, after years of decline. But views on the subject remain politically polarized. These efforts may go the way fact-checking did this year, and quickly get politicized — and made politically suspect — by some with a vested interest in seeing our institutions fail. But whether or not the polls immediately reward our efforts, what choice is there for journalists who, in the end, just want to report honestly and have their work believed? Add it to the job description; this work is necessary, too.

Elizabeth Jensen is the ombudsman/public editor of NPR.

Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy   Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Helen Havlak   Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds

Tanzina Vega   It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Errin Haines   At the ballot, it’s time to count black women

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Aron Pilhofer   We can’t leave the business to the business side any more

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Burt Herman   Things get real

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Julia B. Chan   Looking for loyalty in all the right places

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Alan Soon   The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Jesse Holcomb   Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Jake Levine   The return to now

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Susie Banikarim   R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)

Eric Ulken   The year local publishers get smart(er) about change

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Dan Shanoff   You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Paul Ford   Go global

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Sara M. Watson   Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg   (Hint: It’s about your brand)

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Jim Moroney   Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration