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In December, Nieman Lab published 156 predictions about what’s coming for the industry in 2025. Now, as we set out into the new year, I’ve arranged some don’t-miss entries for you, on themes from power to reporting and production to podcasts — and ending with hope.
Embracing influencers as allies. “News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.” — Marlon A. Walker, The Marshall Project
Back to the bundle. “There are big reasons both on the consumer and the corporate side to expect a wave of bundling….If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will.” — Ben Smith, Semafor
Publishers reckon with dark patterns. “Not all of the dark patterns that news organizations employ involve digital technology. Audience members have reported having difficulty unsubscribing from certain news organizations, having to call customer service instead of being able to cancel their subscription online where they signed up….News organizations will have to reckon with their use of designs that place them in the same categories as annoying sales sites and scammers.” — Jasmine McNealy, University of Florida
Prediction markets go mainstream. “At their core, prediction markets are a form of decentralized information gathering. They theoretically reward accuracy over sensationalism, prioritizing actionable data instead of attention-grabbing headlines….Much like how social media empowered content creators to leverage the internet to become the media, prediction markets allow users to quantify and monetize the information they have access to.” — Taylor Lorenz, User Mag
Journalists explain legislative procedure. “The daily functioning of what happens in Congress depends on procedural statutes that are nuanced, confusing, and, quite frankly, boring — despite their relevance for the future of democratic life….The role journalists have to play in this form of government accountability couldn’t be more vital — but these types of stories have always been seen as inside baseball.” — Nik Usher, University of San Diego
Media owners will protect the powerful. “Many within these organizations have already shown a willingness to hold back in favor of access to political elites — so these actions by owners and CEOs will be more of an alignment of goals than a top-down push.” — J. Siguru Wahutu, NYU
Media’s acquiescence to Trump will fail. “The ‘view from nowhere’ is inherently unappealing. Trump’s hardest core is completely poisoned against mainstream media brands, and no amount of right-wing commentary will provide an antidote. The rest of us can see right through a brand of mock objectivity that hides the facts it pretends to showcase, like when The New York Times transformed Trump’s eugenics vitriol into his ‘long fascination with genes.’ Business Insider’s Adam Rogers calls it ‘a view from distinctly somewhere’ — a place outside petty intellectual and earthly concerns. It’s the confidence of people who think they’re beyond the chance of consequences.” — Noah Shachtman
Cross-border collaboration shines in dark corners. “As illiberal regimes take pointers from one another, the sum of their efforts to suppress information is greater than the parts. But two can play at this game.” — Laxmi Parthasarathy, Global Press
Getting beyond the fact-check. “How many initiatives have you seen recently promoting prebunks, debunks, fact-checks, or explainers as the ultimate solutions to disinformation? How many media literacy workshops have claimed they could inoculate people against falsehoods? And how many super powerful AI tools? While these initiatives are valuable, they’re no longer innovative.” — Cristina Tardáguila, Agência Lupa
People won’t like you. “If you’re producing news, people aren’t going to like you. Like, literally. They’re not going to like stories about corruption and greed — especially if it involves people in power. They’re not going to like posts about officials and their sexual assault allegations. They’re not going to like news of pregnant people dying because they’re not getting the care they need. And they’re not going to like reports of various rights being stripped from folks on the margins.” — Julia Chan, The 19th
Maybe we really are done with news? “I want to point to a more mundane phenomenon where news becomes less important and news consumption less ritualized for larger numbers of people — including many who read this site.” — Matt Carlson, University of Minnesota
Followers stop following. “Let’s give it a name, even if it hasn’t happened yet (and hopefully won’t): The Great Unfollowing. It will happen across the board. Podcasts will see the number of people donating through Patreon have dropped, subscriber numbers on paid services will fall.” — Joanne McNeil
Watch your language. “Already we see terms like ‘border-area ranch‘ being used to refer to a Texas facility that is proposed as a detention center. This isn’t the first time the U.S. has used language to create a gulf to separate people the administration has deemed to be a threat.” — Doris Truong
Visual investigations become a mainstay of news. “Visual investigations are poised to move from niche desks to standard operating procedure in newsrooms in 2025….As journalists’ competency in such forensic-style analysis of visual material rises (thanks in part to pioneering efforts by actors like BBC, The New York Times, and Bellingcat), this practice will become a mainstay of journalism.” — Ståle Grut, University of Oslo
Science journalism becomes plain old journalism. “The newsrooms that succeed will be the ones embracing science as a thread that runs through every beat. This shift will require systemic changes. Less than 3% of reporters and editors in the U.S. — and even fewer elsewhere in the world — have formal training in covering science, health, or climate.” — Siri Carpenter, The Open Notebook
The New York Times will hire a pro-Trump columnist. “It may be a challenge to find a writer who can channel the viewpoint of the American voters who favored Donald Trump in 2024 while still honoring the principles of responsible journalism…The New York Times, compared [its] competitors, has historically shown extreme reluctance to grant unabashedly right-wing writers a regular spot on its opinion pages. But the paper’s current leaders seem to dread being perceived as part of the resistance to Trumpism.” — Matthew Pressman, Seton Hall University
Embrace the barbell. “People are gravitating to extremes in the types of content they consume — whether scrolling short-form posts or listening to hours-long podcasts. We must meet them there….It’s time to abandon middling stories and go very short or very long.” — Millie Tran, Council on Foreign Relations
AI helps us revisit old journalism territory. “Some pivots, once deemed infeasible…might be worth a second look using new technology.” — David Cohn, Advance Local
AI companies grapple with what it means to be creators of news. “If a human journalist were consistently making these same errors, they’d probably be out of a job.” — Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism
The media reckons with AGI. “Rather than treat [artificial general intelligence] as a fringe concern, we must be proactive and ambitious: taking the possibility seriously, considering the implications, and starting a public, democratic conversation.” — Shakeel Hashim, Transformer
Publishers find the AI era not all that lucrative. “Most publishers will not get any meaningful revenue from licensing content to technology companies, and that those who do are likely to be large publishers who get at most a few percent of incremental revenue.” — Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Copenhagen
Get ready for the AI-driven world of news. “Sure, there will always be a place for deep investigative work, sparkling writing, and carefully crafted, insightful narratives. But that’s not what most journalism is; we’re largely in the much more mundane business of informing readers about that day’s events. And that’s the work that AI systems will disrupt first.” — Gina Chua, Semafor
More small- and mid-level podcasts hit the stage. “There are severe limits to the depth of engagement and connection that can be achieved between a compelling show and its loyal audience when everything happens via RSS feed. That’s where live events come in.” — Juleyka Lantigua, LWC Studios
The podcast middle class will continue to shrink. “The most optimistic read on this is that the big shows — the one percenters — will entice advertisers to buy spots across networks, a trickle-down economics for the podcast middle class. But has that prosperity ever actually trickled downstream?” — Alex Sujong Laughlin, Defector Media
The rise of informal news networks. “Once the goal is no longer to recreate news organizations as they existed in the past, but rather to ensure that reliable news and information flows — that there is a place in people’s lives for deliberation and debate — then possibility blossoms.” — Heather Chaplin, The New School
We’ll draw the lines we will not cross. “This year, I predict that you — yes, you — will stand up, speak up, and do the right thing for the communities we aim to serve.” — Robert Hernandez, USC Annenberg
Lessons learned in the Building of Lost Causes. “When the numbers looked impossible, when trolls flooded our mentions, when the future looked bleak — you get granular. You bear down on your beat. You focus on the next investigation. You find the next subscriber, the next funder, the next nation-rocking revelation. You build your foundation story by story, even when the ground beneath you could shift at any moment. You roll up your sleeves.” — Linda Solomon Wood, National Observer
— Laura Hazard Owen
From the weekThat time Rupert Murdoch endorsed Jimmy Carter (no, really)It was the first time many Americans saw Rupert Murdoch using his news outlets to advance his interests — and a lesson in how a media mogul’s outside financial ties can taint the editorial product. By Joshua Benton. |
GBH tried to sell the home of a legendary radio station. It kicked off a proxy war for the soul of audio.“Woods Hole tends to be pretty passionate about things, and when people get startled they get angry.” By Neel Dhanesha. |
Let’s fact-check Mark Zuckerberg’s fact-checking announcementZuckerberg didn’t mention that a big chunk of the content fact-checkers have been flagging is not political speech, but the low-quality spammy clickbait that Meta platforms have commodified. By Alexios Mantzarlis. |
Academics team up to address the biggest challenges in local news research“A lot of people assume that there is some list somewhere of all the local news outlets in particular places. And that just doesn’t exist.” By Sophie Culpepper. |
Thousands of documentaries are fueling AI models built by Apple, Meta, and NvidiaSubtitles for documentaries by Alex Gibney, Ava DuVernay and Ken Burns, and episodes of PBS’ Frontline and BBC’s Panorama, were used to train LLMs. By Andrew Deck. |
Solidarity journalism could help news organizations build credibilityWhen reporting in solidarity, journalists use newsworthiness criteria, sourcing tactics, and framing styles that are distinct from those typically used by mainstream media. By Anita Varma. |
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