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For 16 years now, we’ve asked smart people what they think will happen in the coming year in the world of journalism and digital media. And this year’s collection of predictions, published last month, is the biggest — and, I think, the best — yet. (I may be uniquely qualified to make that judgment, as I am certainly the only human to have read all 1,881 predictions we’ve ever published.)
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But I’m certainly aware that sorting through all those predictions — 210 this year — can be a lot. Every year, there are nuggets of gold that don’t get the attention I think they deserve, and it can be hard to determine a prediction’s topic from a headline alone.
So to help you find the ones that might be most valuable to you, I’ve divided those 210 predictions into 21 categories: AI slop and disinformation, AI strategy, AI tools and workflows, audience fatigue, business models, collaboration and ecosystems, coverage choices, creators and independents, diversity and representation, editorial strategy, global and exiled journalism, journalism education, local news and placemaking, newsroom culture, platforms and tech, press freedom and democracy, product thinking, social media and vertical video, storycraft and format, the human premium, and trust and verification. And I’ve highlighted some of our favorites — the ones whose ideas have stuck with me and other Nieman Lab staffers most. May your 2026 be better than your 2025.
AI strategy
- / The AI winners won’t be the biggest newsrooms
- / Forget “Google Zero.” We need to talk about “People Zero.”
- / A renaissance for structured journalism
- / Publishers fight Big Tech with small local language models
- / Local news organizations discover the value of their own archives
- / Media companies will find opportunity and threat in AI
- / AI isn’t the threat anymore. Avoiding it is.
- / AI will reinvent local news
- / We won’t get fooled again (we hope)
- / The AI winners will recognize that knowledge needs humans
- / Local news starts becoming local infrastructure
AI slop and disinformation
- / Newsrooms will embrace some AI-generated imagery
- / We’ll stop worrying and learn to love the misinformation bomb
- / In 2026, AI will outwrite humans
- / Newsrooms will reckon with AI slop
- / A tech company will claim to have achieved AGI. The news media won’t be ready.
AI tools and workflows
- / News product teams are uniquely positioned to unlock AI value
- / The rise of agentic journalism
- / Big newsrooms pave the way for AI agents in journalism
- / Pre-news systems become mainstream
- / Automation arrives in newsrooms
- / Vibe coding to empower communities
- / Rise of the vibecoding journalists
- / The rise of the throwaway news app
- / AI will rewrite the architecture of the newsroom
- / AI turns the firehose into a funnel
- / AI breaks the hamster wheel of journalism
Audience fatigue
- / Short-form video drives reach. That’s exactly the problem.
- / Escaping the sad AI internet
- / Audiences are sick of being treated as consumers
- / The diploma divide continues to grow
- / Local newsrooms will play more
- / Joy — not just fatigue — will shape news habits in 2026
Business models
- / Journalism producers will (re)see their product as a business
- / 3 big risks catch up with some indie publishers in 2026
- / Journalism realizes it has a business talent problem
- / A reckoning comes for journalism philanthropy
- / Publishers will see no meaningful AI licensing revenue
- / Revenue diversity is the path forward
- / Every media business becomes an events business
- / The return of the media brand
- / The gap between nonprofit and for-profit local news will widen
- / The walls around public media keep coming down
- / The year AI companies pay for the value of publishing
- / The closing of the shop
- / Local investigative reporting will make money again
- / We’ll finally see new forms of financing for local news
Collaboration and ecosystems
- / Journalism becomes a house of commons
- / The year of the network
- / Local networks, not silver bullets, will sustain local news
- / Public media will stop acting like a legacy airline
- / Surfacing deserving stories to share becomes easier
- / Podcasts can save public media (seriously)
- / The divide between consolidation and collaboration deepens
- / Public media sees infrastructure as its next act of service
- / Mission over masthead: The case for radical collaboration
- / How to slay a Trojan Horse
- / Coalition — not consolidation — is the key to independent media’s survival
- / Newsrooms invest in editorial partnerships
- / Creator partnerships are ripe for opportunities, if newsrooms do the work
- / Collaboration becomes civic memory
- / Public media’s next act
Coverage choices
- / The year we all algorithm-proof our audiences
- / Journalism can learn from the Southern reproductive justice movement
- / Cultural reporting in the new culture wars
- / Rethinking the news experience
- / Sports media gets much tougher on sports gambling
- / Shame will haunt New York Times leadership
- / Journalists will acknowledge the apathetic audience
- / The media will become terminally addicted to gambling
- / Scoops will matter more than ever
- / We’ll realize there’s no political journalism without tech journalism
- / Google will look beyond volume journalism
- / The political journalism that matters most will be built from the ground up
- / A myth-busting quiz to get you set for 2026
Creators and independents
- / The future of news is people, bots, and the avatars we trust
- / Adapting is the only way to survive
- / The pedestal we’ve placed “journalism” on will crumble. And that’s brilliant.
- / Publishers will finally learn to truly value news creators
- / De-influencing news influencers
- / Publisher investments fizzle, creator investments sizzle
- / Audiences will increasingly direct news coverage — for better and for worse
- / Why creator-journalists, not brands, will get invited to the party
- / The creator infrastructure gap will define journalism’s next chapter
- / News creators help publishers get back in the ring
- / Small acts take center stage
- / Independent publishers set the agenda
Diversity and representation
- / DEI dies in darkness, taking integrity with it
- / The year we stop pretending the industry has changed
- / A time for clear-eyed conviction — and courage
- / The DEI whiplash continues
- / Cis journalists stop putting trans people’s existence up for debate
- / Newsrooms reckon with how collective identities have changed
- / Cultural fluency is the strongest currency for media in 2026
- / Migrant joy as an act of resistance
Editorial strategy
- / Editors will start tackling the 5% challenge — and it won’t be fun
- / Local news learns to love the arts again
- / News organizations will solidify their moats — and build their bridges
- / Finding a candle in the dark
- / Newsrooms build the muscle to survive many futures at once
- / We will stop freaking out about AI
- / Crowdsourced accountability reporting shines a brighter light on Big Tech
- / The year journalists abandon the press conference
- / We stop chasing chaos
- / Journalism will break from the hero narrative
- / We address the cracks in our foundation
- / Journalists will start asking the right questions
- / We’ve been serving the wrong audience
- / Journalism will ask better questions and listen to different answers
- / The press realizes where it’s failed and starts to change
Global and exiled journalism
- / New global perspectives will hit your inbox
- / Exiled journalism’s biggest threat is something more mundane than censorship
- / As AI sharpens media’s class divide, lessons from the global majority
- / Exiled media will leave grant dependency behind
- / Protecting immigrant journalists has to be an industry-wide priority
- / We guarantee the death of most remaining newsrooms
Journalism education
- / The year of wonder
- / J-schools will formalize the creator economy education
- / Journalism education will reflect student conviction
- / Everyone is a journal-ish
- / Please learn how to use your computer
- / Young journalists force the industry to change — whether it’s ready or not
- / Student journalists rise to an unprecedented challenge
Local news and placemaking
- / Local news touches grass
- / A civic revival begins locally
- / Journalism actually shows up
- / The newsroom becomes a commons
- / The future of news is happening where no one is looking
- / The growth hackers come to your town
- / They’re not coming
- / Placemaking will become a priority (again) for local/regional media
- / We’ll celebrate the journalists who weave communities together
- / Journalism establishes a physical presence
Newsroom culture
- / More organizing in the new, weird media landscape
- / Journalism job postings will reflect our dystopia
- / We can’t build the future of journalism while losing the people who build it
- / Welcome to the next Renaissance
- / The Global North learns coping skills from the Global South
- / Emotions become the industry’s superpower
Platforms and tech
- / The year journalism stops outsourcing its independence
- / Journalists finally break Big Tech’s free-speech spell
- / AI will probably force you to gate your content
- / The AI bubble may pop. People’s use of AI for information won’t.
- / APIs for news
- / Publishers leave the dead malls of Web 2.0
- / Journalists talk about the elephant in the room: our relationship with Big Tech
- / Platforms realize they don’t need journalists
- / “Show your work” makes a triumphant return
- / Big Tech needs us more than we need them
- / Journalism’s influencer obsession will age poorly
Press freedom and democracy
- / Journalists will join forces with lawyers to fight back in court
- / The year we band together and fight back
- / A year for revolutionary journalism
- / The year journalism goes underground in America
- / News organizations wake up to the threat to their existence
- / A year to choose solidarity over silence
- / The fight for independence
- / The fence is down
- / The war on the press escalates
- / Journalism will stop relying on exposure to hold the powerful accountable
- / The year journalism fights back in the courts
- / Working through the hour of maximum danger
- / From both-sidesism to backbone
- / Journalists finally take state-sanctioned trolling seriously
Product thinking
- / News gets reshaped to match the way your brain works
- / Coming up, in the next season of “Journalism”
- / No more loose taxonomies or dirty data
- / Local news embraces its consumer product role
- / Want loyalty? Investing in hard-to-reach audiences will be the key
- / Pressured by chatbots, newsrooms push past the one-story-fits-all model
- / Disruption? You ain’t seen nothing
- / The year news and product teams actually work together
- / Successful newsrooms will act more like consultancies than content factories
- / Welcome to your ice cream shop
- / Loyalty, not scale, is key
- / Information germ theory
- / The year news gets personalized (seriously)
- / Rise of the product marketplace
Social media and vertical video
- / Charting a path out of the slop bucket
- / Social media’s decline is journalism’s hope
- / Journalism will become the center of gravity for YouTube’s next era
- / Newsroom vertical video meets a crossroads
- / Newsrooms become talent hubs for vertical video journalists
Storycraft and format
- / News orgs feed the appetite for authenticity
- / Attention economy bears get vindicated
- / Long-form video is the next big thing for young audiences
- / Data needs to drive conversations, not division
- / Let “soft news” lead to hard conversations
- / The divide between culture reporter and critic closes
- / Sorry, the explainer is dead
- / Information becomes malleable
- / Journalism’s songwriter era
The human premium
- / The “HBO of podcasting” finally emerges
- / AI makes human journalists more important than ever
- / Journalism is in danger of bending itself around AI
- / To compete with machines, we become more human
- / AI will force us to be more ambitious, more human storytellers
Trust and verification
- / Stewarding the stories that power tries to silence
- / 2026 is a call for clarity
- / If confusion is the commodity, certainty is the premium product
- / The fact-checking mandate evolves from politics to personal security
- / Journalism starts obsessing over something other than trust
- / Journalists will accept that their critics are sometimes right
- / Reporters will have to cultivate trust the old-school way
- / AI supercharges the challenges of discerning truth from fiction
- / Taking journalism down to its studs
- / A visual verification tax comes due
- / Taking bias seriously
- / From fact-checking to friction-checking
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