20200
P
1
20100
R  E
2
2070
D   I   C
3
2050
T   I   O   N
4
2040
S   F   O   R   J
5
2030
O  U  R  N  A  L
6
2020
I  S  M  2  0  2  0
7

A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song

“In campaigns around the country, there will be fewer exaggerations and falsehoods. Politicians will try to out-do each other by bragging about their good records for Pinocchios and Truth-O-Meter ratings.”

Fact-checkers will win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. “The prize is meant to recognise the tireless work of all the journalists who sought the truth,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee will say. “In an age of unprecedented misinformation, the fact-checkers have exposed the world’s liars in powerful new ways.”

The committee will note that fact-checking is no longer just a niche form of journalism but now a key part of everyday news coverage. “Fact-checkers are now the backbone of global reporting,” the committee will say.

Hollywood will start production on Seeking the Truth, a film starring Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron as courageous journalists who run a nonpartisan fact-checking site. They discover that shadowy forces are spying on them and rummaging through their past to try to pressure them about a fact-check on Medicaid expansion. The Pitt and Theron characters believe the rating should be Pants on Fire, but in a meeting in a dark alley, a mysterious representative of the shadowy forces says it should be Mostly False. The movie will co-star Tom Hanks as a curmudgeonly but supportive publisher.

Taylor Swift will release “Get the Facts,” the first pop song to celebrate fact-checking. (“Lost my way / Couldn’t find the truth / Scoundrels on TV and Twitter / Liars are so uncouth / Liii-iiii-arrs are soooooo uncouth”). Swift will donate her earnings from the song to the International Fact-Checking Network. She will perform “Get the Facts” during halftime at the Super Bowl, with 69 dancers representing the 69 journalism organizations that have signed the International Fact-Checking Code of Principles. The dancers will wear tasteful costumes with big check marks. Aerosmith will also be there.

Also in 2020, tech companies will dramatically expand their use of fact-checking. Facebook, Google, and YouTube will append fact-checks to ads by politicians and will take unprecedented steps to demote false content. Politicians and partisans will complain, but the companies will say it’s important to empower democracy. Twitter will make the shocking move of putting red checkmarks on the faces of politicians who earn lots of false ratings. The company will provide a $10 million grant to fact-checkers to fund their work.

Fox, CNN, and MSNBC will each launch nightly fact-checking shows. Unlike the cable channels’ other programming, the shows will truly be non-partisan, with actual journalists instead of pundits. The shows will even call out exaggerations and falsehoods by their own hosts and commentators. The fact-checking programs will earn double the ratings of the partisan shows.

The infusion of money from Taylor Swift and Twitter will pay for a historic surge of fact-checking just in time for the November election. The money will create something of a space race at the local level, as TV stations, public radio, newspapers, and nonprofit news organizations mobilize to check politicians at all levels. Media companies will put aside their rivalries and share content.

Politicians will notice. In campaigns around the country, there will be fewer exaggerations and falsehoods. Politicians will try to out-do each other by bragging about their good records for Pinocchios and Truth-O-Meter ratings. Voters will go to the polls in November with an extraordinary understanding of what was true and what wasn’t. Some of them will be humming “Get the Facts.”

Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and the Knight Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University.

Fact-checkers will win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. “The prize is meant to recognise the tireless work of all the journalists who sought the truth,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee will say. “In an age of unprecedented misinformation, the fact-checkers have exposed the world’s liars in powerful new ways.”

The committee will note that fact-checking is no longer just a niche form of journalism but now a key part of everyday news coverage. “Fact-checkers are now the backbone of global reporting,” the committee will say.

Hollywood will start production on Seeking the Truth, a film starring Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron as courageous journalists who run a nonpartisan fact-checking site. They discover that shadowy forces are spying on them and rummaging through their past to try to pressure them about a fact-check on Medicaid expansion. The Pitt and Theron characters believe the rating should be Pants on Fire, but in a meeting in a dark alley, a mysterious representative of the shadowy forces says it should be Mostly False. The movie will co-star Tom Hanks as a curmudgeonly but supportive publisher.

Taylor Swift will release “Get the Facts,” the first pop song to celebrate fact-checking. (“Lost my way / Couldn’t find the truth / Scoundrels on TV and Twitter / Liars are so uncouth / Liii-iiii-arrs are soooooo uncouth”). Swift will donate her earnings from the song to the International Fact-Checking Network. She will perform “Get the Facts” during halftime at the Super Bowl, with 69 dancers representing the 69 journalism organizations that have signed the International Fact-Checking Code of Principles. The dancers will wear tasteful costumes with big check marks. Aerosmith will also be there.

Also in 2020, tech companies will dramatically expand their use of fact-checking. Facebook, Google, and YouTube will append fact-checks to ads by politicians and will take unprecedented steps to demote false content. Politicians and partisans will complain, but the companies will say it’s important to empower democracy. Twitter will make the shocking move of putting red checkmarks on the faces of politicians who earn lots of false ratings. The company will provide a $10 million grant to fact-checkers to fund their work.

Fox, CNN, and MSNBC will each launch nightly fact-checking shows. Unlike the cable channels’ other programming, the shows will truly be non-partisan, with actual journalists instead of pundits. The shows will even call out exaggerations and falsehoods by their own hosts and commentators. The fact-checking programs will earn double the ratings of the partisan shows.

The infusion of money from Taylor Swift and Twitter will pay for a historic surge of fact-checking just in time for the November election. The money will create something of a space race at the local level, as TV stations, public radio, newspapers, and nonprofit news organizations mobilize to check politicians at all levels. Media companies will put aside their rivalries and share content.

Politicians will notice. In campaigns around the country, there will be fewer exaggerations and falsehoods. Politicians will try to out-do each other by bragging about their good records for Pinocchios and Truth-O-Meter ratings. Voters will go to the polls in November with an extraordinary understanding of what was true and what wasn’t. Some of them will be humming “Get the Facts.”

Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and the Knight Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University.

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

M. Scott Havens   First-party data becomes media’s most important currency

Kevin D. Grant   The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth

Bill Adair   A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Power to the people (on your audience team)

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

Nico Gendron   Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

Dannagal G. Young   Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful

Kourtney Bitterly   Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline

Raney Aronson-Rath   News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions

Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb   Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

Mario García   Think small (screen)

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

Nicholas Jackson   What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support

A.J. Bauer   A fork in the road for conservative media

Carrie Brown-Smith   Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The business we want, not the business we had

AX Mina   The Forum we wanted, the forum we got

Matt DeRienzo   Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph

J. Siguru Wahutu   Western journalists, learn from your African peers

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

Millie Tran   Wicked

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Errin Haines   Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

Joshua P. Darr   All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Laura E. Davis   Know the context your journalism is operating within

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

John Garrett   It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization

Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker   A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Nikki Usher   All systems down

Joanne McNeil   A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)

Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz   News coverage gets geo-fragmented

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

Zizi Papacharissi   A president leads, the press follows, reality fades

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Jim Brady   We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Rachel Davis Mersey   The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Cory Haik   We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

Marie Gilot   This is fine

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

Linda Solomon Wood   Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

Irving Washington   Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

Christa Scharfenberg   It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

Margarita Noriega   The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Lucas Graves   A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement