The future is female

“My prediction is not solely that media leadership will be feminized, but that news itself will take on a new, more feminine, tone.”

Among the predictions published in this series last year, none proved more prescient than Rachel Sklar’s “Women are Going to Get Loud.” It’s as if Rachel got an advance copy of Time’s Person of the Year issue — really advance.

The #MeToo movement has been an efficient juggernaut, blasting open decades of workplace hostility and harassment, and nowhere has it gotten more attention than in the field of media. (So much for “report the story, don’t become the story.”) Certainly, media is not the only industry so plagued by misogyny — there are others where it’s even more widespread. Nonetheless, it’s the media’s job to expose these outbreaks and it can’t even begin to help in that regard until it puts on its own oxygen mask.

The main consequences of this reckoning have been terminations, resignations, leaves of absence. And so it happens that there are suddenly a whole lot of vacancies in leadership roles across many media organizations. Already we’re seeing some of these roles filled by women. Expect that trend to accelerate and expand. There’s a surfeit of female talent that’s been sitting too long on the bench.

It never made sense for journalism to skew so heavily male at its highest ranks for so long. Media corporations can’t say with a straight face that it’s a “pipeline problem” with regards to women eager to study, work, and lead in journalism, as technology titans feebly do. According to Poynter, journalism schools award diplomas to women at a more than 2 to 1 ratio. Per ASNE, that ratio somehow flips in terms of newsroom supervisory roles, with women comprising only 37 percent. Media is storytelling, communication, information dissemination…we’re not talking about the defense industry or investment banking. These are skills women have long been stereotyped for having mastered — and yet, haven’t yet been deemed authoritative enough in to be awarded a mantle of leadership. Isn’t it ironic?

That all ends next year. My prediction is not solely that media leadership will be feminized, but that news itself will take on a new, more feminine, tone. No, this doesn’t mean more articles on weight loss and beauty trends. Instead, it means that women will be seen as reliable sources and the sexism embedded into articles about women’s issues and female public figures (“Who were they wearing?”) won’t make it past first edit. It also means we can expect newsroom resources dedicated to uncovering stories of other underserved and underreported communities. This means we can expect more two-way communication between storytellers and readers — something more authentic and constructive than a comments section.

I expect the female media takeover will bring also bring a novel remedy to the phenomenon of so-called fake news and the overall stratification of media along ideological lines. Don’t ask me how I know — it’s just my woman’s intuition. 2017 wasn’t pretty for our industry, but there’s hope for 2018. This time next year, “content is queen” will roll right off the tongue.

Jennifer Coogan is chief content officer of Newsela.

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Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

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

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Paul Ford   Go global

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Burt Herman   Things get real

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

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

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

AX Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Carrie Brown   Transparency finally takes off

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Nik Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

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

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

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

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

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

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

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

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

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

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

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Jake Levine   The return to now

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

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

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

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

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

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

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

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

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

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

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

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

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator