My predictions for 2025, plus I read every Nieman prediction (so you don’t have to)

My predictions: Thoughts on local news, AI, influencers, and more

Lenfest Institute updates: What happened in the past month and what to expect next year

Interesting quotes, Nieman edition: I read every Nieman prediction (so you don’t have to)

Interesting quotes, regular edition: Things to think about

My Spotify playlist, as always

Prediction: Some local news organizations will make meaningful efforts to build strategic partnerships in their communities. In doing so, they may find unlikely allies, regain some of the audience diversity they’ve lost, and even expand their reach.

Prediction: We’ll stress-test some of the big theories behind Press Forward. While I don’t expect to have all my questions answered by the end of the year, here’s what I hope to see in 2025:Side note: Kudos to P. Kim Bui and Jody Brannon, the only two people (as far as Google can tell) who mentioned Press Forward in their Nieman predictions — it’s only the biggest mobilization to fund journalism ever.

Prediction: News organizations will try to engage influencers who already understand these dynamics. However, if there’s one principle all influencers share, it’s that they don’t work for free. They’ll expect to be paid—often handsomely. Hiring them may be a tough pill to swallow, given tight budgets and ethical concerns. Still, if these individuals are viewed as talent whose role is to sell your reporting to the community, and they agree to adhere to a clear set of standards, news organizations may make progress in recapturing lost audiences.

Prediction: Many news organizations will ask early-career employees and other talented team members to take on this work, expecting them to add it to their existing roles without additional pay. Some organizations may see early success if they have a unicorn or two on staff, but most efforts will take time to gain traction or fall flat. This is because these team members will have too many priorities, insufficient freedom to experiment effectively. Efforts will also stagnate due to attrition.

Prediction: Organizations (not just news organizations) that proactively develop AI standards will drive innovation and see the most success. Those that don’t will face limited rewards and amplified risks—the worst combination—it could be anything from embarrassing errors to leaks of privileged information.

Prediction: Some news organizations will experiment with training AI on their archives. This could offer many benefits, including compensating for losses in institutional knowledge. However, in doing so, organizations—particularly legacy ones—may be forced to confront historical biases. If they’re not careful, these biases could resurface in alarming—and embarrassingly public—ways.

Prediction: After this period of wound-licking, we’ll see some efforts here. If audiences see journalists acting passionately—even entertainingly—in battles against institutional overreach and incompetence, they might gain some fandom. One piece of advice for those aspiring to become public personalities: don’t alienate your peers. Instead, take a lesson from the past decade of collaboration and use your success to lift others.

Prediction: Senior leaders who attempt to encourage fun among staff may come across as tone-deaf at best, given the seriousness of the challenges and pay disparities. At worst, Michael Scott. My advice to leaders: you can loosen people up by loosening the leash—and the purse strings.

Prediction: We’ll see many new success stories. But there’s still a bumpy road ahead and we’ll also see layoffs in surprising places.

Prediction: Modern news organizations will continue to value DEI, but many corporate ones will attempt to send it down the memory hole.

📌 Beyond Print toolkit: A comprehensive guide for newspapers transitioning from a print subscription model to digital.

Institute for Nonprofit News collaboration: We collaborated with the INN Index team on a dashboard to show revenue and audience growth for statewide news publishers. Got an idea for a tool that folks could use in 2025? Email me!

Best practices for annual reports: We rounded up some guidelines for creating meaningful annual reports, including good examples.

Reflections from Lenfest fellows: We asked alumni of the Institute’s Constellation program to reflect on how their careers have evolved since participating in the program. Read posts by Vicky Díaz-Camacho and Monique Curry-Mims.

💰 New opportunities for Lenfest Community of Practice members will be announced in early 2025.

Alexandra Borchardt: Newsrooms reinvent their political journalism“What if the media’s calling out those who don’t respect democracy and its institutions doesn’t deter people from voting exactly those politicians into office?”

Shira Center: Journalists will learn to stop worrying and love the business plan“Journalists will continue to take matters into their own hands — or spreadsheets — either as entrepreneurs striking out on their own or innovators in established and legacy institutions.”

Paul Cheung: Journalism faces its Kobayashi Maru moment“News organizations must simultaneously rebuild trust and authority while completely reimagining how they serve and engage their audiences.”

Jennifer Choi: Redesign news infrastructures to build community power“We’ve forgotten how to create the conditions for us to safely and openly disagree.”

Gina Chua: Get ready for the AI-driven world of news“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.”

David Cohn: AI helps us revisit old journalism territory“Some pivots, once deemed infeasible, might be worth a second look using new technology.”

Hillary Frey, There’s no “Trump Bump” (and that’s good!)“There’s an opportunity to cover Trump differently this time. We don’t need to sustain our astonishment or tap into our own panic and worry every time he says or does something heretofore unfathomable.”

Marie Gilot: Play with AI like your career depends on it (it does)“Do it every morning until it knows you so well, it becomes your brainstorming partner. The more you understand the tools, the more you understand what’s possible.”

S. Mitra Kalita: We’ll rethink scale, trust, and our life’s work“Five years ago, when I left mainstream media to launch my own companies, I thought I had had enough exposure to the business ‘side.’ But it’s taken me landing deals, making payroll, and growing customers to internalize these lessons and apply them.”

Izabella Kaminska, Journalism faces a reckoning, in Soviet style“To gain trust, journalists will have to openly declare their principles so that they can be judged by peers and readers based on how well they adhere to those standards.”

Sarah Marshall: Focus on the “flabby middle” of the audience funnel”An audience funnel was once an inverted triangle. It’s now an inverted trapezoid.”

Delano Massey: Journalism has its Kendrick Lamar year“The hunger for news hasn’t disappeared — it’s waiting to be fed with integrity, vision, and courage.”

Jasmine McNealy: Publishers reckon with dark patterns“News organizations will have to reckon with their use of designs that place them in the same categories as annoying sales sites and scammers.”

Sharon Moshavi: We’ll reach beyond our own lane“I hope to see more news media pursue innovative, meaningful collaboration with the multitude of stakeholders who today make up the civic information space…the technologists, citizen journalists, researchers, civil society, and yes, content creators who value accuracy, fairness, and transparency.”

Julia Munslow: Content creators find a place in newsrooms“Picture a modern-day news anchor who has perfected the skill of connecting with online audiences.”

Victor Pickard: Media reform focuses on state and local initiatives“Media owners themselves can do their part by transitioning their commercial holdings into nonprofit or public-benefit alternatives, especially before hedge funds and their ilk swoop in to pick apart struggling newspapers. Examples of such alternative ownership structures are found in The Salt Lake Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the LNP newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

Michael Rain: Listening to the quiet majority“The obligations of journalists extend beyond mere reporting; we must encompass the creation of a genuine forum for discourse.”

Dmitry Shishkin: Why 2025 is all about user needs“It’s wonderful to have specific brand needs like ‘Help me discover new ideas,’ ‘Orient me,’ ‘Help me relate,’ ‘Bring clarity,’ ‘Enrich my life,’ ‘Motivate me,’ ‘Show me the impact.’”

Jonathan Stray: Newsrooms will keep losing their conservative audiences“Do conservative audience losses mean that news publishers are biased? I don’t think that’s the right place to start. Instead, we should ask about the mission of the newsroom. Who, exactly, do journalists hope to serve?”

Cristina Tardáguila: Getting beyond the fact-check“We need to embrace behavioral science. Journalism’s fight against disinformation risks irrelevance if it fails to consider how the human mind processes and reacts to both falsehoods and facts.”

Esther Kezia Thorpe: The print revival comes to news“A ‘finishable’ print product from a trusted source which takes the time to explain and consider news would be right for the growing wave of news avoiders who are overwhelmed by the 24/7 news cycle.”

Millie Tran: Embrace the barbell“When news organizations try to do everything, they think they’re showing strength, but they’re inadvertently contributing to their own vulnerability.”

Francisco Vara-Orta: The quest for diversity evolves “What I hear — especially among DBEI educators — is proactive talk about what we can do to bring everyone along, to move from what can feel like shaming to inspiring others to reconsider their outlook.”

Marlon A. Walker: Embracing influencers as allies“A friend recently shared a social media post about a political scandal rocking Jackson, Mississippi. The post caught my attention because it drew on reporting work done by The Marshall Project’s local journalists there. But it generated more engagement than any of our own stories — or those from other area news organizations — had on the same topic.”

Fran Wills: Local media gets its swagger back“Return of local media influencers. Local news reporters have always been celebrities in their communities. They work, shop, and dine in the towns they report on. Who knows what’s going on with the Dallas Cowboys better than The Dallas Morning News sports reporters? Next year, local reporters will increase their standing as local influencers in social media and beyond.”

Kyle Chayka: The new rules of media“Whatever is interesting is good, even if it’s ‘old.’”

Asia Fields, Nicole Santa Cruz, Ruth Talbot and Maya Miller: I have lost everything“Dentures. Were thrown away and coping isn't somthing I can do. It’s made me feel ugly, unworthy, can’t go get a job with no teeth. So how can get off the streets until another pair can be made?”

Jessica Grose: Human Interaction Is Now a Luxury Good“We’re increasingly becoming a society where very wealthy people get obsequious, leisurely human care, like concierge medicine paid out of pocket, private schools with tiny class sizes and dead tree books, and apothecaries with personal shoppers. And everybody else might receive long wait times for 15-minute appointments with harried doctors, a public school system with overworked teachers who are supplemented by unproven apps to ‘personalize’ learning and a pharmacy with self-checkout. Or, as Pugh puts it, ‘being able to have a human attend to your needs has become a luxury good.’”

Maxim Loskutoff: The Unabomber’s Influence Is Deeper and More Dangerous Than We Know“What Mr. Kaczynski represents is not a new way forward or an answer to the injustices of the modern world, but another turn of the wheel of violence that brought us here.”

A.O. Scott: Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did.“One thing poets do — part of the romance of their craft — is to spin the wretchedness and tedium of ordinary life into the shimmering gold of art.”

Nate Silver: The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency“What was supposed to be a triumph of management for a technocratic elite instead wound up as a worst-of-all-worlds scenario.”

Bret Stephens: Done With Never Trump“Fight the wrongs that are real and not merely what we fear.”

Ben Thompson: The Gen AI Bridge to the Future“This, I think, is the future: the exact UI you need — and nothing more — exactly when you need it, and at no time else.”

Erik Wemple: How much abuse can a local newspaper reporter take?“Lancaster’s media bashers would face a taller task if there were five or six Lisi look-alikes haunting the margins of county board meetings. When it’s just one affable, bearded dude in the peanut gallery, on the other hand — no sweat at all. Blast away.”

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June