Platforms are on life support. Alternative AI interfaces are on the rise. Meta is shifting emphasis away from Facebook to AR- and VR-enabled portals for interaction. Mastodon is emerging as a friendlier, smaller-scale (for now) antidote to the mass interaction most platforms foster. Twitter has transitioned from serving as the PR instrument of President Trump to the pet project of a billionaire. People have begun to exit platforms en masse, leaving behind zombie accounts with many followers and no activity. They download content and lock up accounts. It almost feels like they’re locking up house and leaving hostile territory, hoping possibly to return when things are normal again, whatever that may mean. The people are leaving; the bots keep gaining ground.
Where does that leave journalism?
It’s time for journalists to rethink their relationships to platforms. Platforms are not neutral; they never were. They are technology, and per Kranzberg’s famous first law, technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. Platforms are human-made and reflect the biases of their makers — in particular, of their owners. If journalists want to maintain their commitment to democracy, they must rethink their relationship to platforms that do little to strengthen democracy.
I’m not suggesting that journalists abandon platforms as a site of research and inquiry. However, if news institutions want to rebuild public trust around their mission, they’ll have to think critically about the places they take their business, and their readers, through.
News organizations rely on platforms to distribute content and drive back clicks to their sites. Leaving platforms is a complex decision for them. It’s a decision with economic repercussions. Staying on certain platforms, however, also has democratic consequences. Is it ethical for organizations that carry the crux of democracy to maintain an affiliation with platforms that don’t?
Community, trust, and authenticity do not scale up easily, if at all. As platforms expand, they lose the authenticity that rendered them unique. This isn’t inevitable: Responsible scaling can help platforms grow up and larger in a manner that preserves the affect that originally drew people to that platform. Contextual curation, consistent moderation, socialization to a platform, and etiquette are some practices that can help maintain the original atmosphere of interaction that a platform afforded. They can help preserve the sense of place, what Joshua Meyrowitz presciently described as the right balance between public and private that draws people in and fosters community and trust. But then again, community and trust aren’t things we create instantaneously or share in volume. We don’t trust everyone. We don’t feel close to everyone. We create our own places within larger spaces and thus render the closeness that hopefully will foster community.
As platforms continue to scale up, people’s connections to them will continue to thin out. Platforms will instead offer a Rolodex of contacts; an entry account to other spaces; a zombie account that collects dust like an abandoned house. They will become more vulnerable to content manipulation, engineered to support the whims of venture capital and stock market shorting. At present, the world watches as Elon Musk tweets content that seems tailor-made to test its effect on stock valuation. Musk follows a strategy that creates noise, estimating that this will maintain or increase perceptions of the value of the platform. And he further mocks news organizations for criticizing his practices yet remaining on his platform.
Why stay? Does the economic benefit really outweigh the reputational cost? The time seems opportune to leave and make a statement in so doing. What might shock the system more than all news institutions joining forces and leaving a platform like Twitter together?
If that seems like a lot, I’ll offer an alternative proposal.
In writing this piece, I asked ChatGPT to write me a manifesto for journalism. It offered a formulaic yet accurate treatise on fairness, objectivity, and democracy. The intelligence we create is tuned up to give us the responses we trained it to; does the world we live in fit that description? No. But what if news organizations trained their own conversational agents to engage in different modalities of news storytelling, ones that build on slower forms of news storytelling, like podcasts, that hold promise for building trust? I’m not suggesting that ChatGPT is not susceptible to manipulation, nor that we substitute conversational models for human interaction. I recommend that we optimize language models, like ChatGPT, to complement and augment our abilities instead of substituting; to help news institutions become more engaged in building platforms that are used to share the news, with a long-term investment in rebuilding trust, rather than a short-term interest in profit. Journalists can work together with social scientists and engineers to give these infrastructures the right architecture; the kind that turns a space into a place; the form that fosters trust, community, and accuracy. It’s not a prediction, but it is a challenge and an opportunity for the coming year.
Zizi Papacharissi is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Illinois Chicago).
Platforms are on life support. Alternative AI interfaces are on the rise. Meta is shifting emphasis away from Facebook to AR- and VR-enabled portals for interaction. Mastodon is emerging as a friendlier, smaller-scale (for now) antidote to the mass interaction most platforms foster. Twitter has transitioned from serving as the PR instrument of President Trump to the pet project of a billionaire. People have begun to exit platforms en masse, leaving behind zombie accounts with many followers and no activity. They download content and lock up accounts. It almost feels like they’re locking up house and leaving hostile territory, hoping possibly to return when things are normal again, whatever that may mean. The people are leaving; the bots keep gaining ground.
Where does that leave journalism?
It’s time for journalists to rethink their relationships to platforms. Platforms are not neutral; they never were. They are technology, and per Kranzberg’s famous first law, technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. Platforms are human-made and reflect the biases of their makers — in particular, of their owners. If journalists want to maintain their commitment to democracy, they must rethink their relationship to platforms that do little to strengthen democracy.
I’m not suggesting that journalists abandon platforms as a site of research and inquiry. However, if news institutions want to rebuild public trust around their mission, they’ll have to think critically about the places they take their business, and their readers, through.
News organizations rely on platforms to distribute content and drive back clicks to their sites. Leaving platforms is a complex decision for them. It’s a decision with economic repercussions. Staying on certain platforms, however, also has democratic consequences. Is it ethical for organizations that carry the crux of democracy to maintain an affiliation with platforms that don’t?
Community, trust, and authenticity do not scale up easily, if at all. As platforms expand, they lose the authenticity that rendered them unique. This isn’t inevitable: Responsible scaling can help platforms grow up and larger in a manner that preserves the affect that originally drew people to that platform. Contextual curation, consistent moderation, socialization to a platform, and etiquette are some practices that can help maintain the original atmosphere of interaction that a platform afforded. They can help preserve the sense of place, what Joshua Meyrowitz presciently described as the right balance between public and private that draws people in and fosters community and trust. But then again, community and trust aren’t things we create instantaneously or share in volume. We don’t trust everyone. We don’t feel close to everyone. We create our own places within larger spaces and thus render the closeness that hopefully will foster community.
As platforms continue to scale up, people’s connections to them will continue to thin out. Platforms will instead offer a Rolodex of contacts; an entry account to other spaces; a zombie account that collects dust like an abandoned house. They will become more vulnerable to content manipulation, engineered to support the whims of venture capital and stock market shorting. At present, the world watches as Elon Musk tweets content that seems tailor-made to test its effect on stock valuation. Musk follows a strategy that creates noise, estimating that this will maintain or increase perceptions of the value of the platform. And he further mocks news organizations for criticizing his practices yet remaining on his platform.
Why stay? Does the economic benefit really outweigh the reputational cost? The time seems opportune to leave and make a statement in so doing. What might shock the system more than all news institutions joining forces and leaving a platform like Twitter together?
If that seems like a lot, I’ll offer an alternative proposal.
In writing this piece, I asked ChatGPT to write me a manifesto for journalism. It offered a formulaic yet accurate treatise on fairness, objectivity, and democracy. The intelligence we create is tuned up to give us the responses we trained it to; does the world we live in fit that description? No. But what if news organizations trained their own conversational agents to engage in different modalities of news storytelling, ones that build on slower forms of news storytelling, like podcasts, that hold promise for building trust? I’m not suggesting that ChatGPT is not susceptible to manipulation, nor that we substitute conversational models for human interaction. I recommend that we optimize language models, like ChatGPT, to complement and augment our abilities instead of substituting; to help news institutions become more engaged in building platforms that are used to share the news, with a long-term investment in rebuilding trust, rather than a short-term interest in profit. Journalists can work together with social scientists and engineers to give these infrastructures the right architecture; the kind that turns a space into a place; the form that fosters trust, community, and accuracy. It’s not a prediction, but it is a challenge and an opportunity for the coming year.
Zizi Papacharissi is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Illinois Chicago).
Michael W. Wagner The backlash against pro-democracy reporting is coming
Stefanie Murray The year U.S. media stops screwing around and becomes pro-democracy
Pia Frey Publishers start polling their users at scale
Shanté Cosme The answer to “quiet quitting” is radical empathy
Nicholas Diakopoulos Journalists productively harness generative AI tools
Cassandra Etienne Local news fellowships will help fight newsroom inequities
Emma Carew Grovum The year to resist forgetting about diversity
Joshua P. Darr Local to live, wire to wither
Danielle K. Brown and Kathleen Searles DEI efforts must consider mental health and online abuse
Ariel Zirulnick Journalism doubles down on user needs
Eric Holthaus As social media fragments, marginalized voices gain more power
J. Siguru Wahutu American journalism reckons with its colonialist tendencies
Leezel Tanglao Community partnerships drive better reporting
Mar Cabra The inevitable mental health revolution
Sarah Stonbely Growth in public funding for news and information at the state and local levels
Wilson Liévano Diaspora journalism takes the next step
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Well-being will become a core tenet of journalism
Laxmi Parthasarathy Unlocking the silent demand for international journalism
Ben Werdmuller The internet is up for grabs again
Peter Bale Rising costs force more digital innovation
Moreno Cruz Osório Brazilian journalism turns wounds into action
Sue Schardt Toward a new poetics of journalism
Amy Schmitz Weiss Journalism education faces a crossroads
A.J. Bauer Covering the right wrong
Jessica Maddox Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture
Francesco Zaffarano There is no end of “social media”
Esther Kezia Thorpe Subscription pressures force product innovation
Doris Truong Workers demand to be paid what the job is worth
Jaden Amos TikTok personality journalists continue to rise
Snigdha Sur Newsrooms get nimble in a recession
Nikki Usher This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)
Ryan Kellett Airline-like loyalty programs try to tie down news readers
Molly de Aguiar and Mandy Van Deven Narrative change trend brings new money to journalism
Emily Nonko Incarcerated reporters get more bylines
Sam Guzik AI will start fact-checking. We may not like the results.
Daniel Trielli Trust in news will continue to fall. Just look at Brazil.
Richard Tofel The press might get better at vetting presidential candidates
Sarah Alvarez Dream bigger or lose out
Kerri Hoffman Podcasting goes local
Alexandra Borchardt The year of the climate journalism strategy
Gordon Crovitz The year advertisers stop funding misinformation
Ståle Grut Your newsroom experiences a Midjourney-gate, too
Julia Beizer News fatigue shows us a clear path forward
Anna Nirmala News organizations get new structures
Amethyst J. Davis The slight of the great contraction
Jim VandeHei There is no “peak newsletter”
Cindy Royal Yes, journalists should learn to code, but…
Janet Haven ChatGPT and the future of trust
Jody Brannon We’ll embrace policy remedies
Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper Mission-driven metrics become our North Star
Al Lucca Digital news design gets interesting again
Joanne McNeil Facebook and the media kiss and make up
Parker Molloy We’ll reach new heights of moral panic
Gabe Schneider Well-funded journalism leaders stop making disparate pay
Tamar Charney Flux is the new stability
Bill Grueskin Local news will come to rely on AI
Jessica Clark Open discourse retrenches
Masuma Ahuja Journalism starts working for and with its communities
Sam Gregory Synthetic media forces us to understand how media gets made
Cory Bergman The AI content flood
Eric Thurm Journalists think of themselves as workers
Upasna Gautam Technology that performs at the speed of news
Karina Montoya More reporters on the antitrust beat
Dana Lacey Tech will screw publishers over
Jonas Kaiser Rejecting the “free speech” frame
Priyanjana Bengani Partisan local news networks will collaborate
Andrew Donohue We’ll find out whether journalism can, indeed, save democracy
Ryan Gantz “I’m sorry, but I’m a large language model”
Jenna Weiss-Berman The economic downturn benefits the podcasting industry. (No, really!)
Gina Chua The traditional story structure gets deconstructed
Simon Galperin Philanthropy stops investing in corporate media
Johannes Klingebiel The innovation team, R.I.P.
Hillary Frey Death to the labor-intensive memo for prospective hires
Kaitlyn Wells We’ll prioritize media literacy for children
Eric Nuzum A focus on people instead of power
S. Mitra Kalita “Everything sucks. Good luck to you.”
Alex Sujong Laughlin Credit where it’s due
Elite Truong In platform collapse, an opportunity for community
Jennifer Choi and Jonathan Jackson Funders finally bet on next-generation news entrepreneurs
Kaitlin C. Miller Harassment in journalism won’t get better, but we’ll talk about it more openly
Surya Mattu Data journalists learn from photojournalists
Jakob Moll Journalism startups will think beyond English
Andrew Losowsky Journalism realizes the replacement for Twitter is not a new Twitter
Nicholas Thompson The year AI actually changes the media business
Khushbu Shah Global reporting will suffer
Alexandra Svokos Working harder to reach audiences where they are
Raney Aronson-Rath Journalists will band together to fight intimidation
Victor Pickard The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce
Sue Cross Thinking and acting collectively to save the news
Lisa Heyamoto The independent news industry gets a roadmap to sustainability
Megan Lucero and Shirish Kulkarni The future of journalism is not you
David Cohn AI made this prediction
Laura E. Davis The year we embrace the robots — and ourselves
Tre'vell Anderson Continued culpability in anti-trans campaigns
Mariana Moura Santos A woman who speaks is a woman who changes the world
Zizi Papacharissi Platforms are over
Bill Adair The year of the fact-check (no, really!)
Ayala Panievsky It’s time for PR for journalism
Kirstin McCudden We’ll codify protection of journalism and newsgathering
Eric Ulken Generative AI brings wrongness at scale
Josh Schwartz The AI spammers are coming
Rodney Gibbs Recalibrating how we work apart
Brian Stelter Finding new ways to reach news avoiders
Juleyka Lantigua Newsrooms recognize women of color as the canaries in the coal mine
Brian Moritz Rebuilding the news bundle
Errin Haines Journalists on the campaign trail mend trust with the public
Anthony Nadler Confronting media gerrymandering
Julia Angwin Democracies will get serious about saving journalism
John Davidow A year of intergenerational learning
Mauricio Cabrera It’s no longer about audiences, it’s about communities
Mario García More newsrooms go mobile-first
Anika Anand Independent news businesses lead the way on healthy work cultures
Jacob L. Nelson Despite it all, people will still want to be journalists
Sarabeth Berman Nonprofit local news shows that it can scale
Matt Rasnic More newsroom workers turn to organized labor
Tim Carmody Newsletter writers need a new ethics
Alex Perry New paths to transparency without Twitter
Sumi Aggarwal Smart newsrooms will prioritize board development
Jim Friedlich Local journalism steps up to the challenge of civic coverage
Mael Vallejo More threats to press freedom across the Americas
Peter Sterne AI enters the newsroom
Sarah Marshall A web channel strategy won’t be enough
Janelle Salanga Journalists work from a place of harm reduction
Barbara Raab More journalism funders will take more risks
Taylor Lorenz The “creator economy” will be astroturfed
Basile Simon Towards supporting criminal accountability
Burt Herman The year AI truly arrives — and with it the reckoning
Anita Varma Journalism prioritizes the basic need for survival
Christoph Mergerson The rot at the core of the news business
Rachel Glickhouse Humanizing newsrooms will be a badge of honor
Jennifer Brandel AI couldn’t care less. Journalists will care more.
Paul Cheung More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs
An Xiao Mina Journalism in a time of permacrisis
Kavya Sukumar Belling the cat: The rise of independent fact-checking at scale
Ryan Nave Citizen journalism, but make it equitable
Cari Nazeer and Emily Goligoski News organizations step up their support for caregivers
Joni Deutsch Podcast collaboration — not competition — breeds excellence
Michael Schudson Journalism gets more and more difficult
David Skok Renewed interest in human-powered reporting
Nicholas Jackson There will be launches — and we’ll keep doing the work
Jesse Holcomb Buffeted, whipped, bullied, pulled
Christina Shih Shared values move from nice-to-haves to essentials
Dannagal G. Young Stop rewarding elite performances of identity threat
Susan Chira Equipping local journalism
Martina Efeyini Talk to Gen Z. They’re the experts of Gen Z.
Joe Amditis AI throws a lifeline to local publishers
Larry Ryckman We’ll work together with our competitors
Delano Massey The industry shakes its imposter syndrome
Alan Henry A reckoning with why trust in news is so low
Jarrad Henderson Video editing will help people understand the media they consume
Sue Robinson Engagement journalism will have to confront a tougher reality
Walter Frick Journalists wake up to the power of prediction markets
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau More of the same
Don Day The news about the news is bad. I’m optimistic.
Kathy Lu We need emotionally agile newsroom leaders
Dominic-Madori Davis Everyone finally realizes the need for diverse voices in tech reporting
Felicitas Carrique and Becca Aaronson News product goes from trend to standard