Nieman Lab’s annual Predictions for Journalism asks journalists, editors and other insiders to identify the trends that will shape news media in the coming year.
In previous years, predictions highlighted technology trends and innovation needs. Unsurprisingly, following controversies about fake news and false balance, many of this year’s predictions focus on the news media’s crisis of legitimacy.
Addressing Trust and Media Literacy: Alexis Lloyd, chief design officer at Axios, thinks the chief concern for news media 2017 is re-establishing public trust in journalism. Faced with low-levels of media literacy and distributed platforms that give an air of legitimacy to all comers, news media, she argues, must become transparent to their audiences.
One of the most effective things we may aspire to do in 2017 is to find ways to make journalism more legible and interrogable, to make our ethical standards and reporting processes clear and evident.
Kim Bui, former deputy managing editor of reported.ly, also argues that journalist’s have a duty to teach readers how to evaluate the news.
Media analysis is the natural enemy of the fake. Debunking educates people about what is wrong and what is fake, but news literacy and analysis is what teaches them to evaluate for themselves. This is a part of any journalist’s job: In telling stories, in exposing lies, we should be teaching the public how to evaluate what they read.
Embracing Diversity: Swati Sharma, deputy general assignment editor at The Washington Post, argues that 2017 should be the year newsrooms take more risks and embrace diversity because “people with a wide range of unconventional experiences doing journalism will only make your newsroom better.”
If the mission is to hold our institutions and politicians responsible, to inform readers, to uncover corruption, even to tell a good story — it cannot be done with one kind of voice, with one point of view.
Rebel Journalists: Andrew Ramsammy, founder of UnitedPublic Strategies, offers a ‘rebel journalist manifesto’ because the US Presidential Election revealed that the media is ill-equipped to interact with and serve the populace.
The rebel journalist is someone who, armed with a chosen medium or space, will use their sacred privilege to research and disseminate the purest form of democratic truth and justice, free from restriction.
Audience Data and Community: Geetika Rudra, data analyst at Dataminr, thinks journalism online journalism has become distanced from its audience and consequently fails to function effectively as an online business. She predicts a return to serving the audience as a community and encourages greater emphasis on collecting data about this community.
Journalists are farther than they have ever been from their communities. We cover events in places thousands of miles away, without ever leaving our desks. We interview sources we sometimes never meet in person. Sometimes we just paste together snippets of social media posted by people whose real identities we never confirm.
Read all the Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2017.
