As 2022 draws to a close, it feels like we’ve been here before. Not so much in the specifics of Elon’s exploits — which are truly hair-raising — but the feeling of displacement, dispersal, retreat. 2023 looks to be another season of scrambling, where reporters and audiences alike struggle to identify where the news lives and who they can trust.
Twitter’s implosion has underscored a persistent pattern in journalism, in which periods of consolidation and aggregation of content and eyeballs alternate with explosive experimentation on new platforms. This dynamic tends to drive traffic to celebrity journalists and blue-chip brands while torpedoing the time and energy of everyone else who’s just attempting to report the news.
For journalists, attempts to move to Mastodon mirror the rise of other small-group discussion platforms such as Discord, which put conversations that might have taken place across broadly public platforms behind closed walls. This has real consequences for the ways we talk to one another, how and where new ideas circulate, the ways we follow movements and debates, and the ways we connect with sources.
Musk’s purchase matters because over the years, Twitter emerged as the go-to network for journalists. The hashtag and the blue checkmark may have been weak forms of organization and verification when compared to the rigorous fact-checking of prestige publications, but they were fast and relatively transparent. Of course, Twitter enabled flotillas of hate speech, and a lazy strand of “s/he said” reporting that parroted ramblings of political and cultural influencers. At the same time, though, it enabled powerfully transparent new forms of crowdsourced reporting, accountability, and public assembly.
As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes writes, “Twitter is a place where all kinds of perspectives and obscure expertise are instantly accessible and overlapping. This can be dangerous, sure. But if you find the right people, you can be instantly brought up to speed on everything from the fluctuations in lumber prices to the maintenance problems in the Russian tank fleet to the scouting report on the Welsh goalie. For someone in my line of work, it’s indispensable.”
Of course, Twitter was never the public square of our dreams — unlike the airwaves, it has always been commercial. Given the precipitous dismantling of protections, it’s not surprising that reporters are contemplating jumping ship. But the fragmentation into many smaller conversations taking place in walled-off chats and behind publication firewalls augers a retrenchment in open discourse — particularly dangerous as we continue to be rocked by global public health and climate crises.
Similarly, the “Substackization” of celebrity journalists removes these voices from the larger conversation and makes them more narrowly available to a paying audience made up of superfans. Nice for them, but this does little to support the day-to-day work of gathering and sharing the news.
In the process, once again we see a degradation of a shared public sphere, especially given the range of shifting media habits across generations. This happened with the rise of cable news, talk radio, the blogosphere, podcasting, and on and on. Each time, new generations of aggregators, critics, curators, and tastemakers have risen up to make sense of the cacophony, sniff out fresh forms of reporting, and puzzle through new business models to gather the best-of-breed — often short-changing reporters in the process.
While this may be great for creativity and innovation, it’s proved less helpful for democracy. Our policies and platforms for keeping citizens informed and hosting civil dialogue have lagged many years behind the pace of communications innovations. Plus, it leads to newsroom attrition. Journalists are forced to learn new tech and production skills every few years — to the detriment of actually honing their craft — only to have those skills become moot when a major platform makes a pivot.
This may not sound much like a prediction — but along with annual trend-spotting, another key tool for futurists is pattern recognition. Let’s take a step back for the long view: Amid the frothy hyperbole about the virtues of decentralization, what can we learn from previous moments when our centralized hubs for civic discourse lost salience? And what new forms of aggregation are in the offing that might serve us better than a commercial platform owned by an imperious tyrant?
Jessica Clark is the executive director of Dot Connector Studio, the futurist in residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the publisher of Immerse.news.
As 2022 draws to a close, it feels like we’ve been here before. Not so much in the specifics of Elon’s exploits — which are truly hair-raising — but the feeling of displacement, dispersal, retreat. 2023 looks to be another season of scrambling, where reporters and audiences alike struggle to identify where the news lives and who they can trust.
Twitter’s implosion has underscored a persistent pattern in journalism, in which periods of consolidation and aggregation of content and eyeballs alternate with explosive experimentation on new platforms. This dynamic tends to drive traffic to celebrity journalists and blue-chip brands while torpedoing the time and energy of everyone else who’s just attempting to report the news.
For journalists, attempts to move to Mastodon mirror the rise of other small-group discussion platforms such as Discord, which put conversations that might have taken place across broadly public platforms behind closed walls. This has real consequences for the ways we talk to one another, how and where new ideas circulate, the ways we follow movements and debates, and the ways we connect with sources.
Musk’s purchase matters because over the years, Twitter emerged as the go-to network for journalists. The hashtag and the blue checkmark may have been weak forms of organization and verification when compared to the rigorous fact-checking of prestige publications, but they were fast and relatively transparent. Of course, Twitter enabled flotillas of hate speech, and a lazy strand of “s/he said” reporting that parroted ramblings of political and cultural influencers. At the same time, though, it enabled powerfully transparent new forms of crowdsourced reporting, accountability, and public assembly.
As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes writes, “Twitter is a place where all kinds of perspectives and obscure expertise are instantly accessible and overlapping. This can be dangerous, sure. But if you find the right people, you can be instantly brought up to speed on everything from the fluctuations in lumber prices to the maintenance problems in the Russian tank fleet to the scouting report on the Welsh goalie. For someone in my line of work, it’s indispensable.”
Of course, Twitter was never the public square of our dreams — unlike the airwaves, it has always been commercial. Given the precipitous dismantling of protections, it’s not surprising that reporters are contemplating jumping ship. But the fragmentation into many smaller conversations taking place in walled-off chats and behind publication firewalls augers a retrenchment in open discourse — particularly dangerous as we continue to be rocked by global public health and climate crises.
Similarly, the “Substackization” of celebrity journalists removes these voices from the larger conversation and makes them more narrowly available to a paying audience made up of superfans. Nice for them, but this does little to support the day-to-day work of gathering and sharing the news.
In the process, once again we see a degradation of a shared public sphere, especially given the range of shifting media habits across generations. This happened with the rise of cable news, talk radio, the blogosphere, podcasting, and on and on. Each time, new generations of aggregators, critics, curators, and tastemakers have risen up to make sense of the cacophony, sniff out fresh forms of reporting, and puzzle through new business models to gather the best-of-breed — often short-changing reporters in the process.
While this may be great for creativity and innovation, it’s proved less helpful for democracy. Our policies and platforms for keeping citizens informed and hosting civil dialogue have lagged many years behind the pace of communications innovations. Plus, it leads to newsroom attrition. Journalists are forced to learn new tech and production skills every few years — to the detriment of actually honing their craft — only to have those skills become moot when a major platform makes a pivot.
This may not sound much like a prediction — but along with annual trend-spotting, another key tool for futurists is pattern recognition. Let’s take a step back for the long view: Amid the frothy hyperbole about the virtues of decentralization, what can we learn from previous moments when our centralized hubs for civic discourse lost salience? And what new forms of aggregation are in the offing that might serve us better than a commercial platform owned by an imperious tyrant?
Jessica Clark is the executive director of Dot Connector Studio, the futurist in residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the publisher of Immerse.news.
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Peter Sterne AI enters the newsroom
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Victor Pickard The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce
Jonas Kaiser Rejecting the “free speech” frame
Joanne McNeil Facebook and the media kiss and make up
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Anthony Nadler Confronting media gerrymandering
Upasna Gautam Technology that performs at the speed of news
David Skok Renewed interest in human-powered reporting
Anna Nirmala News organizations get new structures
Larry Ryckman We’ll work together with our competitors
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A.J. Bauer Covering the right wrong
Josh Schwartz The AI spammers are coming
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Jody Brannon We’ll embrace policy remedies
Daniel Trielli Trust in news will continue to fall. Just look at Brazil.
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Sarah Stonbely Growth in public funding for news and information at the state and local levels
Julia Angwin Democracies will get serious about saving journalism
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Kerri Hoffman Podcasting goes local
Mael Vallejo More threats to press freedom across the Americas
Jacob L. Nelson Despite it all, people will still want to be journalists
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Paul Cheung More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs
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Eric Nuzum A focus on people instead of power
Gabe Schneider Well-funded journalism leaders stop making disparate pay
Amethyst J. Davis The slight of the great contraction
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Christoph Mergerson The rot at the core of the news business
Michael Schudson Journalism gets more and more difficult
Cindy Royal Yes, journalists should learn to code, but…
Mauricio Cabrera It’s no longer about audiences, it’s about communities
Nicholas Jackson There will be launches — and we’ll keep doing the work
Sam Gregory Synthetic media forces us to understand how media gets made
J. Siguru Wahutu American journalism reckons with its colonialist tendencies
Joshua P. Darr Local to live, wire to wither
Tre'vell Anderson Continued culpability in anti-trans campaigns
Bill Adair The year of the fact-check (no, really!)
Moreno Cruz Osório Brazilian journalism turns wounds into action
Jennifer Choi and Jonathan Jackson Funders finally bet on next-generation news entrepreneurs
Andrew Donohue We’ll find out whether journalism can, indeed, save democracy
Alan Henry A reckoning with why trust in news is so low
Walter Frick Journalists wake up to the power of prediction markets
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Ryan Gantz “I’m sorry, but I’m a large language model”
Hillary Frey Death to the labor-intensive memo for prospective hires
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Kaitlyn Wells We’ll prioritize media literacy for children
Jim Friedlich Local journalism steps up to the challenge of civic coverage
Tim Carmody Newsletter writers need a new ethics
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Alex Sujong Laughlin Credit where it’s due
Don Day The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.
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Ben Werdmuller The internet is up for grabs again
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David Cohn AI made this prediction
Cassandra Etienne Local news fellowships will help fight newsroom inequities
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Joe Amditis AI throws a lifeline to local publishers
Sarah Alvarez Dream bigger or lose out
Simon Galperin Philanthropy stops investing in corporate media
Al Lucca Digital news design gets interesting again
Jarrad Henderson Video editing will help people understand the media they consume
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Sue Cross Thinking and acting collectively to save the news
Wilson Liévano Diaspora journalism takes the next step
Francesco Zaffarano There is no end of “social media”
Bill Grueskin Local news will come to rely on AI
Kathy Lu We need emotionally agile newsroom leaders
Cari Nazeer and Emily Goligoski News organizations step up their support for caregivers
Taylor Lorenz The “creator economy” will be astroturfed
Eric Thurm Journalists think of themselves as workers
Barbara Raab More journalism funders will take more risks
Emily Nonko Incarcerated reporters get more bylines
Jessica Clark Open discourse retrenches
Nicholas Thompson The year AI actually changes the media business
Andrew Losowsky Journalism realizes the replacement for Twitter is not a new Twitter
Anika Anand Independent news businesses lead the way on healthy work cultures
Jim VandeHei There is no “peak newsletter”
Susan Chira Equipping local journalism
Mariana Moura Santos A woman who speaks is a woman who changes the world
Alex Perry New paths to transparency without Twitter
Sumi Aggarwal Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development
Masuma Ahuja Journalism starts working for and with its communities
Richard Tofel The press might get better at vetting presidential candidates
An Xiao Mina Journalism in a time of permacrisis
Errin Haines Journalists on the campaign trail mend trust with the public
Surya Mattu Data journalists learn from photojournalists
Karina Montoya More reporters on the antitrust beat
Dominic-Madori Davis Everyone finally realizes the need for diverse voices in tech reporting
Nikki Usher This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)
Mar Cabra The inevitable mental health revolution
Pia Frey Publishers start polling their users at scale
Brian Moritz Rebuilding the news bundle
Eric Ulken Generative AI brings wrongness at scale
Shanté Cosme The answer to “quiet quitting” is radical empathy
Molly de Aguiar and Mandy Van Deven Narrative change trend brings new money to journalism
Danielle K. Brown and Kathleen Searles DEI efforts must consider mental health and online abuse
Dana Lacey Tech will screw publishers over
Parker Molloy We’ll reach new heights of moral panic
Joni Deutsch Podcast collaboration — not competition — breeds excellence
Ariel Zirulnick Journalism doubles down on user needs
Lisa Heyamoto The independent news industry gets a roadmap to sustainability
Janet Haven ChatGPT and the future of trust
Sue Robinson Engagement journalism will have to confront a tougher reality
Gordon Crovitz The year advertisers stop funding misinformation
Cory Bergman The AI content flood
Jakob Moll Journalism startups will think beyond English
Kaitlin C. Miller Harassment in journalism won’t get better, but we’ll talk about it more openly
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