A year ago, I published a post titled, “My predictions for 2025, plus I read every Nieman prediction (so you don’t have to).”
Here is a tl;dr of what I predicted (or at least suggested) for the year we just finished:
Local news organizations would begin to view themselves as spokes, not the center, of a larger information ecosystem.
The Press Forward initiative would see progress in scaling the responsibility of funding local news from national to local funders.
News orgs would experiment with creators and repeat some of the mistakes of the past—like by not valuing creators enough.
Embarrassing errors would result from patchwork AI standards.
Journalists would try to regain their swagger for the big fights ahead.
Some high-profile experiments would fail and there would be a walkback of DEI commitments.
Reader, how did I do? Share your thoughts in the comments.
This month, I returned to Nieman Journalism Lab to read the 2026 submissions with the goal of repeating last year’s exercise. After compiling the entries into a single document—necessary because the format encourages “choose your own echo chamber” browsing over holistic reading—it became clear that I needed more time. My thoughts, in order, were: Holy shit. How is this 443 pages long? Has anyone at Nieman Lab even read all these?
So this year, I’m going to break things up. In this post, I’ll share a handful of thoughts going into 2026. Next month, after I’ve finished reading through all 443 pages of the doc, I’ll share a vision for a modern news org if every prediction magically came true. The contradictory nature of hundreds of predictions by people with different goals, motivations, and even definition of journalism should keep things interesting.
My predictions for 2026
The vicious cycle of optimization and “enshittification” will continue… In 2025, caught between platforms optimizing for our attention and the infiltration of AI-generated “slop,” the internet became a more hypnotizing but significantly less fun place to spend time. This trend will only accelerate.
...And a “touch grass” movement will grow: Handmade things—including local journalism—will become increasingly valuable. More of us will begin to ask how the junk flowing into our lives actually helps us, and reporting around affordability, local traditions, and the local impacts of technology will attract bipartisan interest. We will more actively look for things that enrich rather than extract from us, and “buy local” will see a resurgence—extending even to local news businesses.
AI will continue to inspire imagination…The core of AI marketing today is: If you can think of it, AI can do it! For those of us in the business of solving problems, a lot of fun has been had exploring the possibilities. I’ve had some exciting moments myself, such as vibe-coding a tool to manage my online presence or, as the pictures above show, playing with AI toys. This will continue.
…But we’ll also start to settle on what AI is actually good at: While the most popular consumer AI products are built around its uncanny creative abilities, we will find that AI’s use at the practical, protocol level is what really takes off. One thing we’ll see more of: hybrid paywalls that keep the most useful public information free while increasing subscription revenue for enterprise journalism (and blocking bots). We will also see sites that once claimed they would never gate their content decide to thread this needle—and decide they have little choice, anyway.
Trust in big tech will crater… As we become trapped in the optimization-slop cycle, we’ll hear more about how our lives are so complex that we need technology to navigate them. But consumers will reject this line of thinking. Instead, they’ll ask: How much of that complexity is of your technology’s making? Why are we giving so much to you just to manipulate our emotions, expose us to disturbing content, enable fraud, and surveil our every move, etc.?
But platform usage probably won’t…The platforms still have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Still, there is an opening for local journalism if it strives to answer the question: What improves my life?
Next month, I’ll dive into the specifics of those 443 pages and describe what a modern news organization might look like if all these predictions came true.
Happy New Year, and see you on the other side!
Last month’s shuffle
Each month, I put together a Spotify playlist of the songs that caught my ear. Some are familiar to me, some aren’t. Some are old, some are new. The playlist tends to span eras, genres, and sounds. It’s probably not for everyone but here it is!
2024