Three Hunches About the Future of News
Welcome to the Hunch Room, a What’s Next Health space where futurists, leaders, thinkers, and friends ponder the intriguing notions they’ve come across on ShareYourHunch.org. New hunches are posted at Share Your Hunch continually, so be sure to stop in and stroll through. And please, leave a hunch of your own!
Today, the Hunch Room is serving up reflections by Jessica Clark, the futurist in residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and the executive director of Dot Connector Studio. New to hunching? Check out this video!
By Jessica Clark
It’s been a rough few decades for the journalism industry: More than 2,500 newspapers have folded, consolidation of broadcast outlets has accelerated, and the explosion of digital/mobile/streaming platforms has wildly fragmented audience attention.
To tackle these issues head-on, Media Impact Funders (MIF) hosted a mid-October convening at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center marking the 20th anniversary of the Journalism Funders network. As MIF’s former research director, I was curious to learn how issues I’ve worked on extensively have evolved in the past few tumultuous years. Assembling a mix of national, family, and community-based philanthropic organizations, along with leading researchers and nonprofit news innovators, the JFunders event provided a chance for many happy in-person reunions after the pandemic’s forced hiatus. It also offered fertile ground for hunching about the future of news and civic engagement.
As RWJF’s futurist-in-residence, I went in with an ear tuned for fresh developments at the intersection of reporting and health equity. In my futurism work, hunching falls somewhere in between spotting signals — i.e., developments on the margin of a field that may indicate rising behaviors, new inventions, or shifts in attitude — and assembling the evidence needed to verify trends. In the past, hunching has been an important part of my work as a reporter and editor. It also plays a key role in philanthropy, as funders track rising solutions and communities of practice.
Here are just a few of my hunches that rose up during the JFunders event:
In sessions on health and science misinformation, speakers from Kaiser Health News and the Pulitzer Center spoke about initiatives designed to counter Covid misinformation, and the need to support imaginative journalism projects that address “truth decay.” Since 2016, both the news and philanthropic spheres have actively been working to understand how viral propaganda and conspiracy theories spread, and to devise remedies.
Projects such as JournalismAI, which is based at the London School of Economics’ think tank Polis, have been tracking the role of text-based machine learning and automation in journalism for a few years now. But the growing popularity of AI-driven image generators such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney demonstrate the ease with which everyday users can now create convincing photo-realistic images of nearly anything they can imagine. And AI video generators are not far behind. Keep your eyes peeled, and your guard up.
Both the polarized political environment and the need for rapid-response pandemic reporting have inspired unprecedented cooperation among journalism and civic organizations. Elections are often a catalyst for experimentation, and these midterms have been closely watched by reporters and political scientists as a bellwether for the health of democracy around the globe. This is changing the way journalism is practiced.
Initiatives such as Democracy SOS have already brought outlets together to collaborate and learn best practices for reporting in volatile districts. In September, the New Jersey-based Center for Cooperative Media organized Democracy Day, which assembled nearly 400 newsrooms across the country to simultaneously publish and share stories about “democratic process, threats, challenges, and opportunities in the U.S.”
Meanwhile, collaborations are also powering coverage of health-related issues such as food insecurity, water shortages, hospital closures, and more. As newsrooms have built up their collaborative muscles this election season, they may be in better shape to work together if another national health emergency strikes.
One conversation at the bar after the gathering struck me. Those of us who care about the role journalism plays in society bemoan the loss of daily papers and original reporting. But do audiences really notice or care?
A recent “epidemic of news avoidance” suggests that for many, a little can go a long way. Crisis fatigue can cause audiences to tune out. Recent research from the Reuters Institute suggests that some younger people avoid serious news to guard their mental health. The overall percentage of people paying for any type of news subscriptions is below 20 percent. And for outliers like me, with a dozen subscriptions and counting and daily deluge of e-newsletters, the influx can quickly become overwhelming. This results in spending even more subscription dollars on tab and feed managers such as Workona. Where does staying up-to-speed tip over into harmful news addiction? Asking for a friend…
Want to add your own conjectures about the future of media? Check out the Twitter stream from the JFunders convening.
A host of hunches
As I posted these hunches about journalism and technology, I also took a look at what other visitors to the site were wondering, feeling, and noticing. Many of them seem to touch on issues related to trust like this one about rise of scammers, this one about the pace of our news cycle, and this one about misinformation.
Try it for yourself — you can use the “Hunch Stack” feature on the site to collect related hunches, which in turn will get your own wheels turning.
Jessica Clark is RWJF’s futurist in residence, embedded with the Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future team, where she focuses on discovering, exploring and learning from cutting-edge ideas with the potential to help create a Culture of Health. She is the executive director of Dot Connector Studio, a Philadelphia-based media strategy and forecasting consultancy, the publisher of Immerse, co-produced with MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, and the co-author of Making a New Reality: A toolkit for inclusive media futures.
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Now it’s your turn! Have a hunch that’s on your mind? Come set it free at Share Your Hunch! And remember to stop back into the Hunch Room to see what kind of gear-turning hunches can inspire! Share Your Hunch is a project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and its’s Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future team.
