The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

“It is increasingly clear that the operation of the platforms, both from an antitrust perspective and even more importantly from the perspective of democratic governance, has received remarkably little scrutiny.”

The relationship between publishers of news and the digital platforms (especially Facebook and Google) has been fraught for almost a decade. The platforms, leveraging their sheer scale, have seized ever-greater shares of digital advertising revenue and contributed mightily to the collapse of advertising prices by stimulating the supply of advertising opportunities at a rate faster than the demand for it could ever grow. At the same time, the platforms have also driven huge amounts of traffic to the publishers — accentuating the paradox of growing audiences accompanied by falling profits.

All of this may well approach a crisis point in the year ahead. The crisis, if there is one building, began with the revelations, just after the election, of how the platforms, and especially Facebook, had been employed by the Russian government and the Trump campaign, possibly in collusion, to disseminate what has come to be called “fake news.” But the problem goes beyond that.

It is increasingly clear that the operation of the platforms, both from an antitrust perspective and even more importantly from the perspective of democratic governance, has received remarkably little scrutiny. And it seems unfortunately also true that their executives, particularly at Facebook, feel very little impulse for accountability until confronted publicly.

This all puts enormous pressure on journalists to do their job in holding these enormous enterprises to the standards of decency, legality, and democratic practice that we are all entitled to expect of the nation’s most profitable companies. Some work of this sort is being done. We need more. Journalists would do well to recognize the commercial impulses limiting such inquiries — and not to let that deter them. For the sake of all of us, moreover, they need to do this work before it is too late.

Richard J. Tofel is president of ProPublica.

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

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

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

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

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

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

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

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

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

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

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

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

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

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

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

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Burt Herman   Things get real

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Paul Ford   Go global

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

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

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

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

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

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

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

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

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

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

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

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

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Jake Levine   The return to now

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

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

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism