(Roughly) Daily

Well, in any case, it’s been a trying time for journalism. What’s next? The estimable Nieman Lab polled 21 experts…

Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. At the end of a trying 2024, here’s what they had to say…

They’re all eminently worth reviewing, but your correspondent would call out a few:

Nick Petrie: “The year newsrooms tackle their structural issues“

Many publishers remain anchored to hierarchies born in the print era, with editorial at the center and product and technology bolted on as afterthoughts…

Ben Smith: “Back to the Bundle“

If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will…

Alice Marwick: “The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy“

The gap between mainstream media readers, people who get most of their news through influencers or partisan social media, and people who barely think about news at all will create a fundamental schism in how Americans see the world… 2024 was the year “disinformation” outlasted its usefulness. Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world…

And on a more positive (albeit, more distant) note, Adam Thomas: “Impact investment enters the chat“

Somewhere in the future, beyond 2025, a flourishing landscape of adequately financed, equitable media enterprises will deliver impactful content, serve diverse communities, and achieve financial independence…

These and the other provocative pieces at “Predictions for Journalism, 2025,” from @niemanlab.org.

(Image above: source)

* Ben Hecht (from Erik Dorn, his first novel, written while he was a journalist covering the aftermath of World War I in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News)

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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1768 that the first volume of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published by its Edinburgh-based founders, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell. It relatively quickly attained a reputation for excellence in its summarization of knowledge. It prospered in print until the digital revolution and the advent of, first Encarta (which decimated print encyclopedia sales), then Wikipedia (which has much broader and often deeper coverage than a print encyclopedia can, and which has continued to improve its reliability to a level approaching that of EB).