The year journalists become digital security experts

“To tell stories, they will need to understand the digital security dynamics of the subjects they write about. To preserve their own security, they will need to implement hardened digital security tools and practices in their own work.”

The stakes have never been higher: Security breaches routinely make front-page news, and digital security has become a formidable challenge for companies, consumers, politicians, and everyone in between. So far, journalists don’t seem to have been publicly compromised too often. But in 2018, that may change. Stories and confidential sources may be leaked after journalistic institutions are breached. Journalists would be embarrassed, sources would be more cautious, and doing good work would get harder.

All this will become a significant digital security challenge for journalists. To tell stories, they will need to understand the digital security dynamics of the subjects they write about. To preserve their own security, they will need to implement hardened digital security tools and practices in their own work. Digital security will become a core part of the job.

The good news is that digital security has never been easier. For example, hardware security keys provide excellent protection for many common accounts including Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and GitHub. A number of different vendors sell security keys; most cost a few dollars and can be set up in a matter of minutes. Server security has also improved, with a number of cloud providers offering hardened security services.

In 2018, journalists will also think more deeply about the nature of digital security and how digital attackers view the world. Some journalists will emerge as unexpected global experts on practical digital security, rivaling the gurus of the software development community.

By building expertise on digital security, journalists will begin to inform the understanding and decision-making of universities, enterprises, nonprofits, governments, and beyond. Journalists have a unique ability to share their knowledge with the world. When it comes to digital security, that new reservoir of knowledge will change everything.

Justin Kosslyn is the lead product manager of Jigsaw at Google.

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

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

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

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

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Burt Herman   Things get real

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

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

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

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

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

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

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

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

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

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

AX Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

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

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

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

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Jake Levine   The return to now

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

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

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

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

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

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

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

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

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

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

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Paul Ford   Go global

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way