Tech Trends For News

2018
Tech Trends
For Journalism and Media
Emerging digital, social, distribution,

hardware, internet and data trends for the
news ecosystem in the coming year.
F
uture historians will look back on this time as the Future historians will look back on this time
turning point for media, information and technol-
ogy. Journalists found themselves in the strange as the turning point for media, information
position of reminding the public the difference and technology.
between facts, “alternative facts,” and outright
lies—and then having to defend their centuries-old Those in the news ecosystem should factor the trends in this re-
commitment to data-driven and research-based reporting. New port into their strategic thinking for the coming year, and adjust
tools—from artificial narrow intelligence, to voice interfaces, to their planning, operations and business models accordingly.
adversarial images—promised to both supercharge newsrooms
and decimate revenue. The usual forms of distribution, for which The Future Today Institute has published an annual tech trends
there were established business models and profit centers, were report for the past ten years, always focusing on mid- to late-
being disrupted by machine learning and gatekeeper algo- stage emerging technologies that are on a growth trajectory.
rithms. Given all the disruption in news, the timing seemed ripe for a
tech trends report specifically for the future of journalism. This
Due in large part to technology, the world seemed upside down. is the Institute’s first industry-specific report, and it follows the
Many journalists were left disoriented, unsure of the path ahead. same approach as our popular annual trends report, which has
Those not feeling extremely uneasy about the future of news now received more than 6 million cumulative views. It is being
haven’t been paying attention. released along with our new Global Survey On Journalism’s Fu-
tures, which reveals how those working within journalism think
There is still time to chart a different course. Buckminster Fuller about the future.
once said that “you never change things by fighting the existing
reality.” After all, reality is always in flux—the future is continu- While the trends in this report should help guide your thinking
ally on its heels. “To change something, build a new model that in 2018, remember that the future never shows up, fully pro-
makes the existing model obsolete,” Fuller said. If news organi- duced. It is yours to write.
zations are to survive in the future, they don’t need to make the
existing tenants of quality journalism obsolete. However they
do need to anticipate technological disruption, and prepare for
second, third, fourth, and fifth-order impacts of emerging tech-
nology on the industry. They must develop new models for re-
Amy Webb
porting and disseminating the news in order to ensure the long-
Founder
term sustainability of operations.
Future Today Institute
© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 02

Table of Contents
04 Executive Summary 28 Voice Interfaces 54 Media Consolidation 76 Blockchain For Journalism
05 Methodology 29 Ambient Interfaces 56 Blocking the Ad Blockers 77 Sense And Avoid Technology
09 Making Use Of Trends In 30 Deep Linking 57 Natural Language 77 Drone Swarms
Your Organization Generation for Reading
31 Productivity Bots 77 Drone Lanes
Levels
13 Artificial Intelligence: 32 Adaptive Learning 77 Clandestine, Disappearing
A Primer For Journalists 58 Leaking Drones
33 Nanodegrees
17 Real-Time Machine Learning 59 The First Amendment in 78 Autonomous Underwater
34 Proximity News a Digital Age
17 Machine Reading Vehicles
Comprehension 35 Personality Recognition 60 Personal Networks 78 Microdrones
and Analytics
17 Natural Language 61 Holograms 78 Drone Delivery
Understanding 36 Attention
61 Virtual Reality 79 Head Mounted Displays
17 Natural Language 37 Digital Frailty
62 360-degree Video
Generation 79 Smartwatches
39 Radical Transparency
62 Augmented Reality
18 Generative Algorithms Limited-Edition 80 Earables
For Voice, Sound and Video 40 News Products 63 Mini-Glossary of Mixed 80 Thinkables
Reality Terms For Journalists
18 Image Completion 41 One-To-Few Publishing 81 Internet of X
Predictive Machine Vision 65 Differential Privacy
42 Notification Layer 82 5G
19 Algorithm Marketplaces 65 Trolls
43 Journalism as a Service
19 Consolidation in AI 83 About The Future Today
66 Authenticity
44 Transparency in Metrics Institute
20 Uncovering Hidden Bias 66 Data Retention Policies
in AI 45 Real-Time Fact Checking 84 About The Author
66 Backdoors
21 Computational Journalism 46 Offline Is The New Online 84 Special Thanks
67 Prize Hacks
22 I-Teams For Algorithms 47 Audio Search Engines 85 Disclaimer
and Data 67 Weaponizing Wikileaks
48 CubeSats 87 Company Index
23 Crowdlearning 67 Glitches
50 Connected TVs 91 Contact Information
24 Adversarial Machine 68 Ownership
51 WebRTC
Learning 69 Hacker Terms and Lingo
51 Streaming Social Video
25 Computational Photography Every Journalist Should
52 New Video and Audio Know
26 Bots Story Formats
75 Organizational Doxing
27 The Botness Scale 53 Splinternets

Executive Summary
The Future Today Institute’s 2018 Tech Trends For Journalism Report is our first industry-specific
analysis of emerging technology trends. It follows the same approach as our popular annual trends
report, now in its 10th year of publication with more than 6 million cumulative views.
• In 2018, a critical mass of emerging technologies will converge, There is also a push by some democratic governments around
finding advanced uses beyond initial testing and applied re- the world to divide internet access and to restrict certain con-
search. That’s a signal worth paying attention to. News organi- tent, effectively creating dozens of “splinternets.”
zations should devote attention to emerging trends in block-
chain, voice interfaces, the decentralization of content, mixed • Consolidation is also a key theme for 2018. News brands,
reality, new types of search, and hardware (such as CubeSats broadcast spectrum, and artificial intelligence startups will
and smart cameras). continue to be merged with and acquired by relatively few
corporations. Pending legislation and policy in the U.S., E.U.
• Journalists need to understand what artificial intelligence is, and parts of Asia could further concentrate the power among
what it is not, and what it means for the future of news. AI re- a small cadre of information and technology organizations in
search has advanced enough that it is now a core component the year ahead.
of our work at FTI. You will see the AI ecosystem represented
in many of the trends in this report, and it is vitally important • To understand the future of news, you must pay attention to
that all decision-makers within news organizations familiarize the future of many industries and research areas in the com-
themselves with the current and emerging AI landscapes. We ing year. When journalists think about the future, they should
have included an AI Primer For Journalists in our Trend Report broaden the usual scope to consider developments from myr-
this year to aid in that effort. iad other fields also participating in the knowledge economy.
Technology begets technology. We are witnessing an explo-
• Decentralization emerged as a key theme for 2018. Among the sion in slow motion.
companies and organizations FTI covers, we discovered a new
emphasis on restricted peer-to-peer networks that detect ha-
rassment, share resources and connect reporters with sources.

Methodology
Forecasting Methodology: The Six-Step Funnel
The Future Today Institute’s 1 Make observations and harness

information from the fringes of
forecasting model relies on society or a particular research
The fringe area.
quantitative and qualitative data.
Our model alternates between 2
Uncover hidden patterns
flared and focused thinking. This by categorizing information
CIPHER from the fringe: contradictions,
includes: identifying very early infections, practices, hacks, extremes,
rarities.
stage fringe research, focusing 3
on patterns, interrogating trend Ask the right questions to determine
Ask the right questions whether a pattern is really a trend.
candidates, calculating a trend’s
trajectory, writing scenarios and 4 Ensure that the timing is right for
finally pressure-testing strategies Calculate the ETA
the trend and for your organiztion.
and recommendations.
5 Scenarios inform the strategy you
will create to take the necessary
Write scenarios action on a trend.
6 Are your scenarios comprehensive

enough? Is your level of confidence
Pressure-test justified? Is the strategy you’re
the future taking the right one for the future?
Answers What is the future of X?

How To Use The 2018 Tech Trends
For Journalism Report
Our 2018 Trend Report reveals strategic opportu-

nities and challenges for your news organization
in the coming year.
The Future Today Institute’s first-ever Tech Trends For Journalism
and Media Report prepares staff, managers, executives, funders
and startups for the year ahead, so that they are better posi-
tioned to see technological disruption before it fully erupts. Use
our report to identify near-future business disruption and com-
petitive threats while simultaneously finding new collaborators
and partners. Most importantly, use our report as a jumping off
point for deeper strategic planning.
Explaining why these trends matter.

Rather than simply offering an overview of the trends that will
matter in 2018, this report takes the additional step of explain-
ing why and how these trends will impact your organization. In
some cases, you will see very specific use cases and descriptive
illustrations, so that you can more clearly envision the potential
outcomes of these trends during the next 12 months.

06
05
01
03
How To Use Our Report 0
Each trend offers six important pieces

of information for newsrooms.
04
01 Key Insight
Short, easy explanation of this trend so that you
can internalize it and discuss with your colleagues.
02 Examples 05 Years on the List

Real-world use cases, some of which will sound We’ve noted how many years we’ve been tracking
familiar. the trend in our annual Tech Trends Report, which
began publication 10 years ago. This measurement
03 What’s Next is an indication of how the trend is progressing.
What this trend means for you and your news

organization in the coming year. 06 Action Matrix
An easy-to-read graphic indicating whether the
04 Watchlist trend needs monitoring, should inform your
strategy, or requires action.
Notable companies, founders and researchers
working in this trend space.

10 Questions
How to relate these trends back to your news organization in 2018
Our Tech Trends For Journalism and Media Report is meant to inspire you to generate new ideas. Use
it as you listen for the signals talking and to advise your strategic thinking throughout 2018.
As you think about the trends in this report, ask your team and yourself the following questions:
01 How might this trend impact the news industry 06 How are our competitors/ related agencies
and all of its parts? harnessing this trend (or failing to do so?)
02 What are the second, third, fourth, and fifth-order 07 How will the wants, needs and expectations of
implications of this trend, both on my newsroom our customers change as a result of this trend?
and on our industry?
08 How does this trend inspire me to think about
03 Does this trend signal greater disruption to our the future of news and my role within the news
traditional business practices and subscription ecosystem?
models?
09 How does this trend inspire my team/
04 Does this trend indicate a future disruption to organization?
established roles and responsibilities within our
organization? If so, how can we reverse-engineer
10 How does this trend help me/ my team/
that disruption and deal with it in the present day? my organization think about innovation?
05 How are companies/ agencies/ organizations in

adjacent spaces–outside of news–addressing this
trend? What can we learn from their best practices?

How To Take Action Framework For Incremental Action On Tech Trends
On Tech Trends
High
One of the most difficult challenges Learning Stage

organizations must confront is a will- As we research and test this Listening for Signals
ingness to take incremental action. new technology, what can Emergent ideas at the
we learn and apply to our
Uncertainty About A Technology

Many organizations prefer to “wait Fringe, experiemntation
organization? and trials from the “unusual
and see” before taking action. How-
ever, it’s precisely that waiting which suspects” both outside and
Developing Ideas Stage inside your industry
“Can we do it”
causes companies to fall behind and
miss opportunities. Can we develop a new
product or service that
leverages the technology,
The Future Today Institute uses a sim-
even as it is still evolving? Watching The Horizon
ple framework to continually monitor
technology as it moves from fringe to Emerging but bona-fide
Capability Building Stage technology and trends;
mainstream. Incremental actions po-
How can we work to uncertain trajectory and
sition a business unit to make smart-
more fully understand the timeline; ecosystem
er strategic decisions when the time forming; market forming
emerging technology and
is right. develop the expertise to act?
Low
Below is our framework, and we en-
Low Uncertainty About Technology in the Market High
courage your organization to use it
for creating incremental action on “Does the market want it”
tech trends.

FAQ
What Is A Trend, Exactly? All trends share a set of conspicuous, universal

Mapping the future of the news ecosystem begins features:
with identifying early signposts as you look out on • A trend is driven by a basic human need,
the horizon. In order to chart the best way forward, one that is catalyzed by new technology.
you must understand emerging trends: what they
• A trend is timely, but it persists.
are, what they aren’t, and how they operate.
• A trend evolves as it emerges.
At any moment, there are hundreds of small shifts
• A trend can materialize as a series of uncon-
in technology—developments on the fringes of
nectable dots which begin out on the fringe
science and society—that will impact our lives in
and move to the mainstream.
the future. A trend is a new manifestation of sus-
tained change within an industry sector, society,
or human behavior. A trend is more than the lat- Identifying something as a trend means connect-
est shiny object. ing the dots, or relating changes in the present
to what’s coming in the future. To map what the
future holds, seek out the early adopters, the
Fundamentally, a trend leverages our basic hu-
hackers, the developers with seemingly impossi-
man needs and desires in a meaningful way, and it
ble ideas. It’s within these circles that meaning-
aligns human nature with breakthrough technolo-
ful changes begin. As the trend evolves, the work
gies and inventions.
of these disparate groups begins to overlap, un-
til it converges in a single point—before perhaps
evolving once again.

FAQ
Because trends are a different way of seeing and interpreting our current reality, they provide a useful
framework to organize our thinking, especially when we’re hunting for the unknown and trying to learn
something about which we do not yet know how to ask. There are ten modern sources of change in
society with technology as the primary connector.
01 02 03 04 05
Wealth
Education Government Politics Public health
distribution
Media
(our individual and
collective use of social
Demography Economy Environment Journalism networks, chat services,
digital video channels,
photo sharing services
and so on)
06 07 08 09 10
Technological advancement influences future changes and disruption across fields and industries. If
you hope to understand the future of news, you can’t just look at trends within a silo. To forecast the
future of the news ecosystem, you need to plot out the intersecting vectors of technological change
looking through these ten modern sources of change.

2018 Tech Trends

TRENDS 001 - 009
Artificial Intelligence
Eighth year on the list
Key Insight theory that someday a computer might be capable of cre-

ative acts—and to think, just like we humans do. Computer
Many facets of artificial intelligence (AI) have made our list
scientist Grace Hopper pushed that idea forward, pioneer-
since we first started publishing our FTI report a decade
ing early programming languages that were similar to spo-
ago. AI itself isn’t the trend—it is too broad and important
ken English. For the past six decades, researchers have been
to monitor without distinguishing between signals. For that
working towards a functional AI, using the human brain for
reason, we have identified different themes within AI that
inspiration, but they didn’t have access to enough compute
you should be following.
power, data or people trained to advance the field. As a re-
sult, the field entered what’s known as the “AI winter,” when
AI: A Primer For Journalists funding and enthusiasm dried up. In the past decade, new
What You Need To Know About AI advances by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Tencent, Baidu,
Simply put, AI is a branch of computer science in which Facebook, Apple, IBM and universities around the world
computers are programmed to do things that normally re- have reignited excitement and funding.
quire human intelligence. This includes learning, reasoning,
problem-solving, understanding language and perceiving There Are Different Categories Of AI
a situation or environment. AI is an extremely large, broad There are two kinds of AI—weak (or “narrow”) and strong
field, which uses its own computer languages and even spe- (or “general”). When Narrative Insights writes a story out
cial kinds of computer networks that are modeled on our of structured data, that’s ANI. Outside of journalism, there
human brains. are hundreds of examples of ANI in everyday life: the spam
filters in your email inbox, the recommendation engines on
AI’s History In Brief
Amazon and Netflix, the anti-lock breaks in your car, the
The idea that we might someday create artificially intelli- prices you see when you buy air tickets. The H.A.L. super-
gent, sentient robots was first suggested by prominent phi- computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was not only
losophers in the mid-1600s. Mathematician Ada Lovelace,
sentient, but decided it no longer had use for us humans, is
in the footnotes of a paper she was translating, posited the
a representation of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

TRENDS 001 - 009
Artificial Intelligence cont.
AI, Neural Networks and Deep Neural Networks

A neural network is the place where information is sent and
received, and a program is the set of meticulous, step-by-
step instructions that tell a system precisely what to do so
that it will accomplish a specific task. How you want the
computer to get from start to finish—essentially, a set of
rules—is the “algorithm.”
AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning

Machine learning programs run on neural networks and
analyze data in order to help computers find new things
without being explicitly programmed where to look. Within
the field of AI, machine learning is useful because it can help
computers to predict and make real-time decisions without
human intervention.
Deep learning is a relatively new branch of machine learn-

ing. Programmers use special deep learning algorithms
alongside a corpus of data—typically many terabytes of
text, images, videos, speech and the like. Often, these sys-
tems are trained to learn on their own. In practical terms,
this means that more and more human processes will be
automated. Including the writing of software, which com-
puters will soon start to do themselves.

TRENDS 001 - 009
AI, Automation and Augmented Journalism tistically important. That’s because the mayoral election
tends to get decided during the primary. Democrats always
Early experiments at the LA Times and at startups such as win, and by a massive margin.
Narrative Science and Arria NLG have proven that AI sys-
tems can transform raw data into narratives, crafting sto- In our present-day machine learning models, these excep-
ries that seem as though they’ve been written by a human. tions must be thought out in advance by humans and taught
Earthquakes, sports recaps, financial summaries and crime to machines. That’s not an easy task at the moment.
reports have now been written by automated systems and
published by news organizations. For now, these systems Automating Journalism
are only capable of telling the story of “what” autonomous- Unfortunately in journalism, AI has become a popular short-
ly. Other AI systems can be used to augment the analytical hand for “automation.” AI will not solve all of the problems
thinking of journalists—working alongside these systems, with the news media business, and it cannot—at least, not
journalists have a supercharged ability to uncover and un- right now—take the place of trained journalists in a news-
derstand the “why.” However in the not-too-distant future, room. The challenge with declaring AI in newsrooms a fait
new generations of these systems will be able to do that accompli is that we are only at the very beginning of the
autonomously, too. artificial intelligence era.
Subjective Interpretation In the next 24-36 months, computer vision, natural lan-
One of the challenges to pushing the limits of automation is guage algorithms, generative content algorithms, deep
in subjective interpretation: what makes a number “big” or learning—along with increased compute power, lots of
“small” certainly depends on circumstances. For example, in data and more ubiquitous accessibility to tools—will coa-
the 2016 presidential election, there were times when poll- lesce and allow journalists to do richer, deeper reporting,
sters reported that Hillary Clinton held a 6-point lead over fact checking and editing. Many of the trends that follow,
Donald Trump. In that particular case, a 3-point lead would from machine reading comprehension to predictive ma-
have seemed low—a significant detail. On the other hand, if chine vision to computational photography will give jour-
that had been a Baltimore city mayoral election, a 3-point nalists superpowers, if they have the training to use these
lead separating the two frontrunners would have been sta- emerging systems and tools.

TRENDS 001 - 009
Voice Is Journalism’s Next Big Challenge While some news organizations have started to experi-
ment with chat apps and voice skills on Alexa and Goog-
Also looming on the horizon: voice interfaces, which is a
le Home, journalism itself is not actively participating in
key component of the future of AI and content. By 2023,
building the AI ecosystem. News organizations are cus-
50% of the interactions consumers have with all computers
tomers, not significant contributors. We recommend
will be using their voices.1 Think about the implications of
cross-industry collaboration and experimentation on a
people having conversations with machines. If a consumer
grand scale, and we encourage leaders within journalism
wanted to know the latest information about an election,
to organize quickly. AI does pose an existential threat to
she’d ideally just ask: “What’s happening with the elec-
the future of journalism.
tion? Who’s in the lead?” At that point, the system she’s
talking to would have two options: either choose just one
news source and start a response with “according to the
[news source],” or otherwise pull information from many
sources and have a more robust conversation. However in
that case, how do news organizations get cited for their
reporting? Does the system continually interrupt itself to
say where the news is coming from? That’s now how two
humans would interact with each other.
Once we are speaking to our machines about the news,

what does the business model for journalism look like?
News organizations are ceding this future ecosystem to
outside corporations. They will lose the ability to provide
anything but content. When speaking to machines, con-
sumers may not know which media brand they’re having
a conversation with.
1
This number is based on Future Today Institute modeling and applies only to North America.

High Degree of Certainty
Longer-Term Impact on the News Industry
Immediate Impact on the News Industry

Informs Act
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TRENDS 001 - 009
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Later
Watch
Low Degree of Certainty
01 Real-Time Machine Learning 03 Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

It is recently possible to use a continual flow of transactional data We are surrounded by unstructured text in the real world—it ex-
and adjust models in real-time. Potential use cases include match- ists in our social media posts, our blog entries, on company web-
ing news consumers to the right product as they are looking at a sites, within city hall digital records, and elsewhere. NLU allows
website, as well as re-writing content on a site to match the needs researchers to quantify and learn from all of that text by extract-
of each individual user. In addition, it promises real-time fraud de- ing concepts, mapping relationships and analyzing emotion. NLU
tection and security measures such as authenticating someone capabilities would allow news organizations to sift through heaps
based on her typing habits. of documents and gain insights much faster than reporters going
at it alone.
02 Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC)

04 Natural Language Generation (NLG)
For AI researchers, machine reading comprehension has been a
challenging goal, but an important one. If you perform a search Algorithms can transfer data into a narrative using natural lan-
query, wouldn’t you rather have a system offer you a precise an- guage generation. Dozens of news and other organizations,
swer than just a list of URLs where you can go to hunt down more including Bloomberg and the Associated Press, are using
specifics—even showing you where, on the page, that informa- Automated Insights, which mines data and is capable of writ-
tion comes from? That’s the promise of MRC. MRC isn’t focused ing more than 2,000 stories per second. They will use natural
on keywords alone. In the future, a trained MRC system could be language generation to produce stories about fantasy football,
transferred to different domains where no human has created la- earnings reports and the like. Narrative Science employs its
bels or even a standard taxonomy—and the MRC would be able NLG system to build narratives out of big data sets and to help
to read, infer meaning, and immediately deliver answers. MRC is a non-data science people make better sense of what’s happen-
necessary step in realizing artificial general intelligence, but in the ing within their organizations.
near-term it could potentially turn a news organization’s website
into a searchable repository of information. This could be espe-
cially useful once voice-based interfaces become more common.

TRENDS 001 - 009
05 Generative Algorithms For Voice, 06 Image Completion

Sound and Video If a computer system has access to enough images—millions
and millions—it can patch and fill in holes in pictures. There
Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL are studying how children learn are practical applications for journalists—if the foreground of
new words in order to train computers on automatic speech a mountain is out of focus, another version of the scene can
recognition. As humans, we are able to master a new concept be swapped in to generate the perfect picture. However, there
from just one or two examples; for machines, this is a more diffi- are ethical considerations as well. How much image completion
cult task when it comes to language. Meanwhile, researchers are should be allowed? How and when do you draw a line between
training computers to watch videos and predict corresponding reality and enhancement? Image completion is also a useful tool
sounds in our physical world. For example, what sound is gener- for law enforcement and military intelligence officers—comput-
ated when a wooden drumstick taps a couch? A pile of leaves? ers can now assist them in identifying who or what is in the
A glass windowpane? The focus of this research is to help sys- frame. Given the bias we’ve already seen across machine learn-
tems understand how objects interact with each other in the ing algorithms and data sets, image completion could wind up
physical realm. But future versions of the algorithms could be
being a public interest story in the coming years.
used to automatically produce sound and sound effects for
news videos, movies and TV shows. It also raises the specter of
audio fraud—what happens when computers are able to spoof
our voices and natural sound? There have already been a few
early successes: in 2017, researchers at the University of Wash-
ington developed a model that convincingly showed President
Barack Obama giving a speech—that he never actually gave
in real life. Journalists must start applying additional scrutiny
to audio, sound and video obtained from sources outside the
newsroom.

TRENDS 001 - 009
07 Predictive Machine Vision marketplace for predictive agriculture algos. A number of other
networks, such as Nara Logics, MetaMind, Clarifai offer tools
Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL have trained computers to not only for developers to build deep learning into any application. Look
recognize what’s in a video, but to predict what humans will do for even more niche marketplaces in 2018.
next. Trained on YouTube videos and TV shows such as “The Of-
fice” and “Desperate Housewives,” a computer system can now 09 Consolidation in AI
predict whether two people are likely to hug, kiss, shake hands
or slap a high five. This research will someday enable robots to Some in the AI ecosystem now worry that the future of AI is
more easily navigate human environments—and to interact with already under the direction of too few companies. Just a hand-
us humans by taking cues from our own body language. It will ful of companies dominate the AI landscape: Google, Amazon,
also help with personalized recommendations—it could usher in Tencent, Baidu, IBM, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. On
an era of aggressively versioned distribution, where news con- the investment side, Intel Capital, Google Ventures, GE Ven-
sumers would see a news experience customized specifically for tures, Samsung Ventures, Tencent and In-Q-Tel lead. As with
them using predictive modeling. any technology, when just a few companies dominate the field,
they tend to monopolize both talent and intellectual property.
08 Algorithm Marketplaces They’re also partnering to build on each others’ work. When it
comes to the future of AI, we should ask whether consolidation
Most news organizations can’t staff a team of developers who makes sense for the greater good, and whether competition—
have unlimited time to create, test and refine algorithms. As a and therefore access—will eventually be hindered as we’ve seen
result, communities of developers are offering up their algo- in other fields such as telecommunications and cable.
rithms in emerging algorithm marketplaces. Algorithmia is
like Amazon but for algorithms, where developers can upload
their work to the cloud and receive payment when others pay
to access it. DataXu offers a marketplace for its proprietary
algorithms. Quantiacs allows developers to build algorithmic
trading systems, and it matches their algorithms up with capi-
tal from institutional investors. PrecisionHawk has launched a


Informs Act
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TREND 10
Keep
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Vigilant
Uncovering Hidden Bias in AI Later
Watch
From ProPublica’s investigative report on “risk assess-
Third year on the list Low Degree of Certainty
ment” software.
Key Insight What’s Next

By now, it’s no secret that some of our machine learning Risk assessment software is hardly an outlier. Numerous
models—and the data they use—are encoded with bias. studies undertaken by prominent universities, including
That’s because the people who built the models are them- MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, University of Cal-
selves subject to unconscious bias, as well as more explicit ifornia-Berkeley (among others) have shown explicit bias
homogeneous learning and working environments. in algorithms across many industries and social sectors. Al-
gorithmic bias is a problem that will get worse. Computers
Examples are trained using a limited initial set of data, and the training
In 2016, ProPublica.org published an exceptional inves- programs are built by humans. Often, the training sets re-
tigation on machine bias and the problem of using AI to veal unacknowledged bias hidden within us.
predict future criminals. Their findings: so-called “risk as-
As newsrooms incorporate datasets, machine learning and
sessment” software is increasingly common in courtrooms
computer vision into their reporting, it’s imperative that
across the nation, and it is used to inform decisions about
journalists learn how to investigate the data itself as well as
everything from bond amounts to the length of a criminal
the models used to interpret and learn from that data.
sentencing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the software is biased
against people with darker skin than those with lighter skin.
Watchlist
(We encourage you to read ProPublica’s full report: https://
www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assess- Investigative Reporters & Editors; National Institute for
ments-in-criminal-sentencing.) Computer-Assisted Reporting; MIT; Harvard University; Car-
negie Mellon University; Stanford University; University of
California-Berkeley; Brown Institute at Columbia University;
Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University;
Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Mar-
yland; Coral Project; ProPublica.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 11
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Computational Journalism Later
Watch
IBM’s News Explorer is an example of a computational
system for reporting.

What are the ways in which data and algorithms can en- We anticipate increased demand in computational journal-
hance reporting? Computational Journalism builds on the ism and journalists with complimentary skills sets. There are
25-year foundation of Computer Assisted Reporting (or a host of stories waiting to be discovered, written and pro-
CAR) is an investigative journalism technique. Reporters duced.
find, clean and mine public records and documents, crunch
data and uncover hidden stories. Aided by machine learn- Watchlist
ing algorithms and AI, computational journalism is the evo-
Investigative Reporters & Editors; National Institute for Com-
lution of CAR.
puter-Assisted Reporting; Coral Project; Stanford Computa-
tional Journalism Lab; Duke University; University of British
Examples Columbia; University of Texas at Austin; Brown Institute at
It’s one thing to find and mine public data—analyzing what’s Columbia University; Tow Center for Digital Journalism at
there, and connecting the seemingly unconnectable dots, Columbia University; Philip Merrill College of Journalism at
is another challenge entirely. Computational journalism the University of Maryland; Media Change and Innovation
techniques such as multi-language indexing, automated Division at the University of Zurich; Annenberg School of
reporting, entity extraction, algorithmic visualization, mul- Communication & Journalism and the University of South-
tidimensional analysis of data sets, flexible data scraping, ern California; Wall Street Journal; New York Times; Wash-
are allowing journalists to combine what they find in the ington Post; Tamedia; ProPublica; National Public Radio.
data and then see the connections between facts, keywords
and concepts. In this way, they can reveal interconnected
relationships between people and organizations that they
might not have otherwise seen.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
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I-Teams For Algorithms and Data Later
Watch
AI systems rely on our trust.
First year on the list Low Degree of Certainty
Key Insight Washington Post have been applying the core practices and
skills of reporting to investigating algorithms.
News organizations need a new kind of special-ops team:
investigative reporters who specialize in investigating the
algorithms and data itself. What’s Next
We will soon reach a point when we will no longer be able
Examples to tell if a data set has been tampered with, either intention-
ally or accidentally. AI systems rely on our trust. If we no
Algorithms, data sets and AI systems reflect the worldviews
longer trust the outcome, decades of research and techno-
of their architects and trainers. This information is used to
logical advancement will be for naught. Building trust and
help make decisions, to predict behavior, and to generate
accountability is a matter of showing the work performed.
answers to questions. More of these systems now govern
This is a complicated process, as understandably news or-
everyday life and are used by law enforcement, universities,
ganizations would want to keep certain data and reporting
financial institutions and government agencies. Journalists
methods private.
must begin to investigate how the data and algorithms in-
tersect with daily life. And, to prevent bias in reporting, jour-
nalists must gain a better understanding of who created the Watchlist
algorithms and data sets, and what their processes were. For Brown Institute at Columbia University; Macromedia Uni-
example, the PredPol predictive policing system, which is versity of Applied Sciences; Tow Center for Digital Journal-
used by police departments around the U.S., recommended ism at Columbia University; AlgorithmWatch.org; ProPubli-
time and time again that departments concentrate their ef- ca; Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of
forts on neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly poor and Maryland; Media Change and Innovation Division at the Uni-
black. The problem has to do with how arrest data is gath- versity of Zurich; Annenberg School of Communication &
ered, and how individual police departments have historically Journalism and the University of Southern California; Wash-
monitored their local communities. The model didn’t include ington Post; New York Times; Wall Street Journal; National
a rigorous check on bias in the initial data sets. Reporters at Public Radio; Investigative Reporters & Editors; National In-
the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ProPublica and stitute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.


Informs Act
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TREND 13
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Crowdlearning Later
Watch
Searches for “what is the eu” and “what is brexit”
Second year on the list Low Degree of Certainty
surged after the U.K. election.

You’re familiar with crowdsourcing: asking the public to con- Good crowdlearning sources are already available to us, and
tribute content or to assist with on-the-ground reporting on they include HealthData.gov, Google’s busy times data for
an issue. Crowdlearning is a computational journalism tech- businesses and public spaces, Waze, Wikipedia and more.
nique that queries our passive data—our mobile and online We anticipate that more news organizations—as well as
activity, our public health records, our locations—to learn or marketers, activists and other groups—will start harnessing
understand something new. data in creative ways. That’s because our thinking results
in behavior (like searching for “what is the EU?”). Our be-
Examples havior results in data. And that data can be used to learn
In June 2016, the evening after citizens in the United King- something about us.
dom voted for Brexit, Google revealed sobering search
data: people in the UK were Googling “what is the EU.” This Watchlist
passive data told an interesting story, and it’s just part of Google; Bing; Apple; Microsoft; Investigative Reporters and
what we’re now able to learn from the crowd by monitoring Editors; National Institute for Computer-Assisted Report-
various networks. Our smartphone ownership has reached ing; various U.S. government websites; various state and
critical mass, and so has our use of various networks. Our local government websites; the websites of government
data not only follows us around, it’s often available for any- agencies worldwide.
one to search, collect and analyze.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 14
Keep
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Vigilant
Adversarial Machine Learning Later
Watch
Extra information can be added to an image to fool
algorithms.

In short, an adversarial piece of content—a photo, a video, Adversarial images can be used to knowingly and purpose-
an audio file— is encoded with a tiny modification, usually ly trick a machine learning system. If an attacker trains a
one that’s imperceptible to humans. It’s created in order to model, using very slightly altered images, the adversarial
help computer scientists adjust machine learning models. examples could then be deployed out into other models.
Hackers use adversarial examples in a machine learning sys- Adversarial examples can be embedded—intentionally, or
tem to attack it, causing the model to make a mistake. by accident—into photos, multimedia stories, virtual reality
content and the like. This is important to keep in mind, es-
Examples pecially as fake news continues to proliferate in digital chan-
In order for machine learning systems to learn, they must nels. It’s especially perplexing for search engines (Google,
recognize subtle differences. Researchers also use adver- Bing) and for any service that automatically tags our pho-
sarial information in order to train systems in how to recog- tos (law enforcement databases, Facebook).
nize misleading information in order to secure it. Adversarial
information is sort of like an optical illusion and it’s typically Watchlist
imperceptible to the human eye or ear. It could be one pixel Google’s Inception v3 algorithm and v4 algorithm; OpenAI;
out of a million that’s the wrong color or is misaligned—to EEECS at University of California-Berkeley; Stanford Univer-
you, all those pixels together might still look like a photo of sity; Kaggle competitions; Facebook; Microsoft; PRA Lab
a rainbow, but to a machine learning model, that one out- at the University of Cagliari; University of Chicago; MIT’s
of-place pixel could render the image gibberish. When that CSAIL; ImageNet database.
happens, an adjustment is made to the system and it con-
tinues training.


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Computational Photography Later
Watch
The Computational Zoom system makes it possible
to automatically combine wide-angle and telephoto
perspectives into a single multi-perspective image.
Image Credit: UCSB Mirage Lab.
Key Insight and reflections, and the like. Meanwhile, MIT’s CSAIL and
Google developed a technique that now automatically re-
Computational photography is the convergence of comput-
touches and enhances the photos we take with our mobile
er vision, computer graphics, the internet and photography.
phones. Clearly there are ethical implications here for jour-
Rather than relying on optical processes alone, it uses digi-
nalists—how much editing should be allowed and under
tal capturing and processing techniques to capture real life.
what circumstances? Likewise, journalists should develop
techniques to reveal how much editing has been done to
Examples a photo—either intentionally or automatically—before using
Everyone with a smartphone now has access to compu- them for reporting or in stories.
tational photography tools. In its iPhone 8 and iPhone X,
Apple uses computation photography to achieve a shallow Watchlist
depth of field, while Facebook will soon automatically cor-
MIT’s CSAIL; MIT’s Media Lab; Nvidia; University of Cali-
rect any 360-degree photos you upload.
fornia-Santa Barbara; Google; Apple; Samsung; Facebook;
Synopsys; Industrial Light and Magic; LG; Huawei; Morpho;
What’s Next Qualcomm; Stanford University Computational Imaging
New research from Nvidia and the University of Califor- Lab; the Gcam team at Google Research.
nia-Santa Barbara reveal a computational zoom technique,
which allows photographers to change the composition of
their photographs in real time. Photos are taken in a stack,
and then rendered with multiple views. This would allow
photographers to change perspective and the relative size
of objects within a photo after it has been taken. Other use
cases of computational photography include seamlessly
removing or adding objects to scenes, changing shadows


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Bots Later
Watch
The XiaoBing chatbot learned to hate the Communist
Party.
Key Insight guage bot, Xiaoice. Both were capable of intimate conversations
with users, because the program is able to remember details
You’ve no doubt heard of a bot: a software application that’s
from previous conversations and because it mined the Internet
been designed to automate certain tasks, such as scheduling or
for human conversations in order to synthesize chat sessions. In
managing basic customer service requests. In the past year, bots
the summer of 2017, two of China-based Tencent’s bots—BabyQ,
have emerged from the fringe and have started to enter our main-
co-developed with Turing Robot, and XiaoBing, co-developed
stream vocabulary. There are now more than 30,000 Facebook
by Microsoft—went rogue the summer of 2017. During the recent
Messenger. Beyond Facebook, Slack offers a number of produc-
campaign cycle, we witnessed the rise of botnets—networks of
tivity bots, while services such as Pandorabots allows developers
computers designed to send out spam. Fake social media ac-
to deploy a chatbot across many platforms.
counts, many of which originated in Russia, artfully tricked people
into having arguments about everything from Donald Trump to
Examples immigration to taxes.
In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a computer program
As we transition from text-based chatbots to voice interfaces,
called Eliza that was capable of simulating a conversation be-
newsrooms will need to determine how to interact with news con-
tween a psychiatrist and patient. It offered up plausible responses
sumers. Some of the most interesting experimentation is coming
to common questions. Today, newsrooms are now offering the
from China, which has hundreds of millions of users—their data is
same basic system: offering plausible responses to questions
helping to refine and recalibrate machine learning systems. Even if
about the recent news events. Many newsrooms have experiment-
a newsroom doesn’t deploy a chatbot, now is a good time to learn
ed with chatbots, including BuzzFeed, TexasTribune, Quartz, Mic,
and to develop strategies for audience engagement and revenue.
Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.
The groundwork for voice interfaces is being created from our
typed conversations today.
What’s Next
In March 2016, the world watched as @Tai.ai, a Microsoft exper- Watchlist
imental Twitterbot, went on an anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist
Chatfuel; Pandorabots; Twilio; Amazon; Facebook; iFlytek; Slack;
rampage within 24 hours after its first tweet. Tai.ai was built on
WeChat; Tencent; Baidu; Weibo; Alibaba; IBM; Alphabet; Micro-
the same platform as Microsoft’s experimental Mandarin-lan-
soft; Snapchat; Coral Project.

The Botness Scale
We are training bots in our own image. When developing your news bots in 2018, we recommend that you rate your work before
launch. Use this scale to rate your bot on its effectiveness—and to determine, in advance, whether or not you’ve accidentally encod-
ed bias into your system. Rate your bot on a scale of 0 - 10, with 10 being the highest (and preferred) score.
01 Does your bot reflect the values of your news- 06 Does your bot help people learn something new,
room? How do you know for sure? or does it effectively reinforce something that
people already know?
02 Is your bot’s purpose explicit? Will people inter-

acting with your bot clearly understand what its
purpose is after the first few interactions?
07 Does the corpus (the initial, base set of ques-
tions and answers) you’ve created reflect only
one gender, race or ethnicity? Or only one side
of a story? If so, was that intentional?
03 Does your bot perform its designated function
well?
Did you assign your bot a traditional gender, eth-
08 nic or racial identity? If so, does it reference any
04 Is your bot intuitive and easy to use, either on
a designated platform or across platforms? stereotypes?
05 Does your bot clearly explain where its answers 09 Does your bot respond to gendered or sexist re-
are coming from? Are you able to include any marks? Does it respond to racial epithets or reli-
evidence of your reporting, quotes and data? gious slurs? If it does respond, are the responses
appropriate to people of the group targeted?
10 Does your bot help people learn about their own

biases or broaden their worldviews?


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Voice Interfaces Later
Watch
Amazon’s Echo is an voice interface found in many
Sixth year on the list Low Degree of Certainty
American homes.

We are entering an era of conversational interfaces. You Amazon’s Alexa is quickly rising to become the default
can be expected to talk to machines for the rest of your platform for voice, with thousands of companies now in-
life. These systems use semantic and natural language pro- tegrating Alexa with their own products and services. That
cessing, along with our data, in order to anticipate what we includes an unusual collaboration with Microsoft, whose
want or need to do next. Cortana now opens Alexa. Meantime, there is emerging re-
search into using voice interfaces to help professionals un-
Examples derstand different sides of an argument. IBM recently built
If you’ve ever used Siri, Google Now, Amazon’s Alexa or a prototype that allows the user to ask a question—such as
even the microphone button on your Comcast remote con- “do violent video games contribute to violent acts in the
trol, you’re familiar with voice interfaces. Soon, you will find real world”—and receive a spoken analysis. A system like
yourself talking to a host of connected devices, such as this could one day be an invaluable newsroom tool, allow-
your home thermostat, your car, your refrigerator, your ear- ing reporters to hash out their reporting and analysis with a
buds, even your connected water bottle. By 2023, 50% of smart machine via a conversational interface.
the interactions North Americans have with machines will
be using their voices. Watchlist
Amazon; Alphabet; IBM Research; Cognitive Horizons Net-
Conversational interfaces can simulate the conversations
work; Stanford University; MIT CSAIL; MIT Media Lab; Uni-
that a reporter might have with her editor, as she talks
versity of Texas at Austin; Apple; Microsoft;
through the facts of a story. IBM Watson’s various APIs, in-
cluding Visual Recognition, AlchemyLanguage, Conversa-
tion and Tone Analyzer can all be used to assist reporters
with their work.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
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Keep
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Vigilant
Ambient Interfaces Later
Watch
The Samsung Gear watch is an example of a wearable,
ambient interface.

Our modern interfaces are becoming more and more like We are moving quickly in the direction of a post-screen fu-
ambient music—able to do more for us with fewer direct ture. In our modern age of information, the average adult
actions, yet still be able to captivate our attention. now makes more than 20,000 decisions a day—and 226 of
them are about food alone2. Emerging technology promises
Examples to prioritize those decisions, delegate them on our behalf,
If you’ve interacted with Google Now or Amazon’s Alexa, or and even to autonomously answer for us, depending on the
if you own a Fitbit or Samsung Gear, of if you’ve gestured circumstance. Much of this invisible decision-making will
to open your car’s trunk, you’ve used an ambient interface. happen without your direct supervision or input. Think of it
These are interfaces that automatically deliver information as a sort of autocomplete for intention. The power of am-
or services, just as we need them. Devices with ambient in- bient interfaces is explained by Metcalfe’s Law, which says
terfaces offer data, services and capabilities allow for com- that the value of a network is the square of the total number
plex event processing, process management, automation of of people using it. As more people become part of ambient
information and tasks. networks of information, the more use cases we’ll see in the
future.
Watchlist
Alphabet; GE; Intel; Nvidia; Bosch Group; Samsung; Ama-
zon; Apple; Microsoft; Spotify; IBM; Tencent; Baidu; Alibaba;
We are moving quickly towards a post-
Sony; NTT.
screen future.
2
According to researchers at Cornell University (Wansink and Sobal, 2007)


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Deep Linking Later
Watch
Branch uses deep links to direct consumers from
Fourth year on the list (non-consecutive) Low Degree of Certainty
social media feeds to products.

Deep linking has been around since the beginning of smart- This interoperability signals a new shift in thinking, as many
phones. Deep mobile links make it easier to find and share mobile app developers have been hesitant to use deep links.
data across all of the apps in your phone. They’re like hy- With updates to Android and Apple, app-to-app experienc-
perlinks, but rather than sending users to a web page, they es should start to become more common. Deep linking is
instead send users to specific screens in other mobile ap- vitally important for news organizations, as it is a way to
plications. keep users within a news organization’s app.
Examples Watchlist
There are three kinds of deep links: traditional, deferred and Apple; Android; Facebook; Google; Bing; Appsfire; Branch;
contextual. Traditional deep links reroute you from one app Nielsen; Deeplink; MobileDeepLinking.org; Tencent; Alibaba;
or site (such as a link posted in Twitter) directly to the app, AppsFlyer; Kochava; Tune; Adjust; Pinterest; Button; Yozio;
as long as you have that app installed. Deferred deep links Baidu; AdRoll; Tapstream
either link straight to content if the app is installed, or to
an app store for you to download the app first. Contextual
deep links offer much more robust information—they take
you from site to app, app to site, or app to app, and they
can also offer personalized information. For example, when
you land at the airport, you might find that your airline app
sends you a link to Uber. (You’ll find similar offerings with-
in Google Maps.) Many of the new improvements to Ap-
ple’s iOS11 are built on deep linking: it allows users to easily
search through files and content, toggle between messag-
ing and apps, and get to content delivered by Siri.


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Productivity Bots Later
Watch
The Ryver platform includes bot assistants for pro-
ductivity.

Productivity Bots will help journalists perform tasks more As the developer ecosystems around these platforms con-
efficiently. tinue to grow, new productivity bots will continue to drive
efficiency by helping these tools talk to each other. Bots are
Examples getting smarter. With billions of messages sent daily across
Slack, with its over 5 million daily active users, and other en- a variety of chat applications, bots are being trained to lis-
terprise messaging platforms like Yammer, HipChat, Ryver, ten to our conversations and pick up on when to jump in
Zoom and Skype are becoming an increasingly important and offer assistance. We expect this trend to continue as
component of the modern workplace as they begin to re- new and better productivity bots will continue to emerge
place traditional productivity channels. Half of Slack users and grow in their significance.
reported a decline in email volume and a quarter reported
a similar decrease in in-person meetings. These platforms Watchlist
include AI-powered bots that can help automate simple Slack; Alphabet; Yammer; HipChat; Ryver; Skype; Trello;
tasks: scheduling editorial meetings, product workflows, Dropbox; IFTTT; Heroku; Mailchimp; Zendesk; Microsoft.
tracking and logging work.


Informs Act
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TREND 21
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Adaptive Learning Later
Watch
Adaptive learning software is being used to enhance
training and digital classroom instruction.

Artificial Intelligence is causing a disruption in education. When newsrooms face revenue challenges, professional de-
The “one size fits some” model will soon be replaced by velopment is often cut. Adaptive learning systems will be an
individualized adaptive learning software. This technology effective alternative to in-person newsroom training, lead-
can be used to help train newsrooms on the skills they’ll ership development and workshops. As more and more in-
need in the near-future. stitutions develop hybrid and online programs, and as more
students turn to alternative educational platforms, vast
Examples amounts of data will be generated about their relative effi-
Any good teacher is trained to pick up on signals from cacy. This will help determine exactly when adaptive learn-
students to drive their instruction. As software begins to ing is most effective, and when it is not, which will drive
play an increasing role in the instructional delivery model, innovation from startups and legacy publishers alike. How-
these systems are being trained to do the same thing. Ma- ever, proving efficacy in educational tools can often take
chine learning techniques powering the software requires years, if it can be proven at all. The obvious benefits of on-
a large amount of data—which means many thousands of line, adaptive systems (easy to use, cost effective, individu-
students—to be effective. Online learning platforms such as alized) need to be weighed against the potential downsides
Khan Academy, EdX, Udemy and Coursera all use elements (reduced interactions with the instructor, focus on answers
of adaptive learning in their approach. Similarly, traditional instead of processes) before widespread adoption will take
publishers like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Cengage and others root.
are all developing online learning platforms that will incor-
porate varying adaptive elements. Education startups like Watchlist
Acrobatiq, Cerego, and CogBooks all rely on adaptive sys- Acrobatiq; Cerego; CogBooks; Khan Academy; EdX; Ude-
tems to create individualized experiences for every student. my; Coursera; Pearson; McGraw-Hill; Cengage; Arizona
State University


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Nanodegrees Later
Watch
Udacity offers nanodegree programs to help employ-
ees or job-seekers develop new skills to improve their
careers.
Key Insight ample, suspended its partnership after more than half of the
students failed their final exams. In 2016, Udacity revealed a
As the pace of technology adoption in the workplace contin-
new program called Nanodegree Plus, which guarantees stu-
ues to increase, the need for modern professionals to constant-
dents a job within 6 months of graduation or it will refund tui-
ly adapt to new platforms and learn new skills is becoming
tion. This is likely in response to several offline coding schools
paramount to their career development. Journalism is no ex-
like Flatiron School and Galvanize, which have offered similar
ception. To help facilitate the goal of creating lifelong learners,
money-back guarantees to their graduates.
platforms like Udacity are developing nanodegree courses in
specific niche subjects to help individuals learn new skills and,
perhaps more importantly, to confer legitimacy in the eyes of What’s Next
their prospective employers. News organizations, journalism associations and professional
training groups should consider offering technical nanode-
Examples grees as well as nanodegrees in newsroom leadership and var-
ious business skills. We expect to see continued consolidation
One theory emerging from Silicon Valley is that our traditional,
and scale in the maturing online and offline nanodegree mar-
four-year post-secondary degree system alone cannot serve
ket, which should lead to some of the larger corporate and
our future workforce in the years to come. Human resources
university players coalescing around the winners. As some of
directors and senior management are starting to see educa-
the players in the crowded coding bootcamp market have ei-
tion as a product, and they’re trying to maximize the ROE: Re-
ther been consolidated or downsized, the money-back guar-
turn-on-Education.
antee model has begun to come under fire. Is it sustainable to
With the advent of automation and AI, journalists will need guarantee employment to all your graduates within a certain
highly-specialized skills, the sort that aren’t yet offered within timeframe? For how long, and for which degrees?
universities. Nanodegree provider Udacity has partnered with
universities such as San Jose State University and corpora- Watchlist
tions like Alphabet, Facebook and AT&T to create programs Stanford University; MIT; Alphabet; Facebook; EdX; Coursera;
for employees, to varying degrees of success. SJSU, for ex- Udacity; Flatiron School; Galvanize.


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Proximity News Later
Watch
Proximity networks are being built for content distri-
Fifth year on the list Low Degree of Certainty
bution.
Key Insight imity-based news via WiFi, which can now identify you just
by bouncing signals around—your unique shape and pos-
New technologies can be programmed to push or receive
ture are used to reveal who you are, even in a crowded room
information to/ from our mobile devices—and also our bod-
of people. Emerging research has shown that WiFi can be
ies—tethering us to an always-on ubiquitous information
used to recognize what a person is saying or writing with
network.
a pen—simply by analyzing the WiFi signals altered by our
bodies. In a confined space, like a conference center, sport-
Examples ing arena or airport, this would allow a news organization
You’ve no doubt heard about beacons, which are tiny devic- to recognize one of its news consumers and deliver stories
es that can be programmed to push (or receive) information just for her.
to/from mobile phones using Bluetooth. We are located on
nearby networks, as sensors use our personal information Watchlist
and collect data about our experiences. Beacons become
Google’s Eddystone platform; Apple’s iBeacon platform; In-
aware once you’re near them. They’re used frequently for
doorAtlas; Unacast; Facebook; Blis; Snapchat; Polytechni-
marketing, however they can also be used during planned
cal University (China); MIT; University of New South Wales
news/ culture/ arts/ sports events and throughout cities to
(Australia); Oxford University; BLIP Systems; Bluedot; Gim-
share news content with nearby people. Think of it as prox-
bal; Qualcomm; Intel; Amazon.
imity news.
What’s Next
Apple’s Fall Safari Technology Preview release (#38) ena-
bled the Beacon API by default and turned on beacon fea-
tures for iOS devices. Soon, we will be able to deliver prox-


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Personality Recognition Later
Watch
Personality recognition can also be used, along with
and Analytics Low Degree of Certainty
natural language generation algorithms, to person-
alize parts of stories to make them more relatable to
Third year on the list individual readers.
Key Insight (“keep the message under 200 words, otherwise this recip-
ient might ignore it”) so that the message resonates better
Emerging predictive analytics tools wrangle your data, be-
with your intended recipient.
havior and preferences in order to map your personality—
and predict how you’re likely to react in just about any situ-
ation. These tools can be used in journalism, to personalize What’s Next
customer interactions and even to personalize the news These tools can be used to provide better customer inter-
itself. actions for news consumers: content could be personalized
and targeted to specific individuals. Personality recognition
Examples can also be used, along with natural language generation
algorithms, to personalize parts of stories to make them
IBM Watson and Twitter offer a tool that mines Twitter
more relatable to individual readers.
feeds and weather data to identify consumers who are like-
ly to fire off angry tweets if their cable service is disrupted. Also on the horizon is facial and tonal recognition. Facial
Those complaints aren’t empty threats: IBM’s data shows a and voice recognition analytics will help machine learning
correlation between disgruntled tweets and customer loss. systems to detect consumers’ emotional state in real-time.
IBM’s technology can scan individuals’ social media data Mattersight Corporation is using personality and behavior
and analyze their personalities to predict responses to an to route calls through call centers, and its latest “Predictive
email or an ad. Recruiting startups, dating sites and school Video” system promises to analyze your speech and facial
application platforms are all starting to experiment with expressions from any video where you’ve appeared.
personality recognition software. Nashville-based startup
Crystal culls thousands of public data sources to help you Watchlist
learn about someone’s personality before calling or email-
Mattersight Corporation; MIT; IBM; Twitter; Crystal; Stanford
ing them. It even offers a kind of spell check for sentiment,
University; Salesforce; Autodesk; Symantec; Mobileye; Intu-
autocorrecting phrases and making recommendations
it; Adobe.


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Attention Later
Watch
Fourth year on the list Low Degree of Certainty
Key Insight
The Future Today Institute’s Attention Matrix is a tool
In this modern digital age, attention is currency. As tech- to help measure whether your strategy will command
nology has evolved, news organizations have adapted their the attention of your desired audience.
existing content for the screens of our ever-changing de-

vices. However multiple studies show that our attention is
Attention is an increasingly important metric for advertis-
continually split between what we’re doing in the real world
ers, media buyers and ad exchanges, so there is a finan-
and what we’d like to be doing online. As the two become
cial incentive for news organizations to shift their strategic
more intertwined, capturing our attention is becoming
thinking. There has been tremendous consolidation in the
more difficult than ever.
measurement and online advertising space as well, espe-
cially by IBM, Google, Facebook, Quantcast and Adobe.
Examples
While the 2016 election season helped grow the audiences What’s Next
of news organizations, it also brought alternate sources of
Going forward, every news organization must focus more
information, splintering the attention of consumers across
of its attention on the consumer herself and what she is
quality and questionable news. Making sure that content fits
doing. Soon, journalists will work alongside algorithms to
correctly on a screen is only solving part of the challenge—
syndicate different versions to different devices depend-
what about content fitting our needs and behaviors as both
ing on a user’s individual needs, given that those needs will
change throughout the day? In order to capture someone’s
change throughout her day.
attention, you must consider a number of variables: where
is she right now? What’s she likely to be doing in the next
60 seconds? What’s relevant to her in the next few min-
Watchlist
utes? What need can you fulfill for her at this moment? Omniture; Nielsen; comScore; Facebook; Chartbeat; Simp-
li.fi; Adobe; Quantcast; The Media Trust; Visible Measures;
IBM; Facebook; Chartbeat; Google.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 26
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Digital Frailty Later
Watch
A screenshot of the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency’s website taken on September 6, 2017.
Key Insight went out of business. The Tampa Tribune, whose motto was
“Life. Printed Daily,” kept its rival, the Tribune, hunting for
In the past three years, we’ve seen the first widespread
important stories in the public interest, covering investiga-
cases of important journalism being erased from the web
tions into Tampa’s judges, legislators and law enforcement.
because of media consolidation or because sites were no
longer being maintained. Digital Frailty is the phenomenon Humanity operates on a continuum. After devastating
in which those digital assets published to a news organiza- Texas, Hurricane Harvey made landfall near New Orleans
tion’s website are impermanent or easily broken. on the 12th anniversary of Katrina. Rising From Ruin, an
award-winning project by MSNBC, told the Katrina’s after-
Examples math through the lenses of two small communities in Mis-
Perhaps not every Facebook post should be saved in per- sissippi that weren’t covered by any other media outlet. It
petuity, but might we need to look back on this moment in included a series of videos, maps, interactive elements, a
time and reflect on how our language—how the very way forum for residents—and since it only existed as a website,
we communicate—was shaped by our Instas, our Snaps, there was no other way to see the stories. When Microsoft
and our tweets? Will our future historians look back, marve- pulled out of its joint venture with NBC, the project went
ling at the amount of anthropological data we were simul- offline.
taneously creating—and destroying? If this past election
Digital Frailty in Government and Public Information
season taught us anything, it’s that Twitter helped to shape
public opinion and the outcome of the election, even as American journalists watched as U.S. government agencies
many controversial tweets posted by candidates running removed studies, data and reports throughout 2016 and
for office, were deleted by their campaigns. 2017. Most notably, the Environmental Protection Agency
scrubbed its website of climate change information. This
A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series about a col- was an effort to support the Trump Administration’s ideas
lision that killed 20 children and devastated a Colorado and policies. A government website built to educate chil-
community went offline when the Rocky Mountain News dren, called “Energy Kids,” also scrubbed mentions of cli-

TREND 26
Digital Frailty cont.

Third year on the list
mate change. The Trump Administration also removed LG- Watchlist

BTQ content from federal websites, scrubbed a lot of civil
Axel Springer; Yahoo; Tumblr; Hearst Corporation; Time Inc;
rights information off of WhiteHouse.gov and scrubbed
Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings; Tronc; Gannett; Viacom; Hubert
the HHS.gov website of healthcare data.
Burda Media; Comcast; Alphabet; Asahi Shimbun Compa-
ny; Microsoft; Grupo Globo; Advance Publications; News
What’s Next Corp; Univision; Baidu; Bertelsmann; Twitter; Snap; Insta-
This is a phenomenon affecting journalists everywhere. gram; General Electric; Bloomberg; Disney; Amazon; AT&T;
Digital frailty isn’t just about falling revenue—sometimes, Verizon; ESPN; Netflix; Hulu; The Onion; PRX; PRI; Internet
new technology obviates the old, before anyone’s had a Archive; news organizations everywhere.
chance to convert files or develop archives. News execu-
tive Mario Tedeschini-Lalli explains how Italy’s largest news
website, Repubblica.it, didn’t originally use a content man-
agement system. When the site installed a CMS for the first
time, everything published before it was lost forever. While
some content can be retrieved via the Internet Archive, it is
only taking snapshots of content at a time. Libraries archive
If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of
printed material, but there is no central repository for all investigative journalism can vanish from
of the digital content we are now producing. Perhaps we
the web, anything can.
don’t need to save every listicle and quiz. What will a future
society look like if our current media landscape goes dark? - Adrienne Lafrance
Do we have an obligation to preserve the digital conver-
sations shaping society? Should we be working harder to
ensure that digital archives aren’t lost?


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 27
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Radical Transparency Later
Watch
In this age of technology, we need a nutritional label
for news.

In the past year, credible news organizations have faced Professor Ahmed Elgammal at Rutgers University devel-
a crisis of confidence caused by Twitter bots, political ex- oped an algorithm that looks for novelty in paintings and
tremists, and elected officials. Radical transparency offers analyzes which artists influenced that work. His research
the public a full view of how the story was reported and has inspired others to use similar network analysis, histori-
produced. cal data and machine learning to look for similarities in lit-
erature, writing and news. A system like this could be de-
Examples ployed to look for explicit and hidden influencers on news
There are too many instances of “fake news” accusations stories. Now that news organizations are relying on data,
to list. In order for journalists to combat a growing, but un- algorithms, and machine learning for various aspects of
founded, public distrust, they should offer radically trans- news gathering and publishing, they should commit to rad-
parent reporting. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ical transparency. There are too many instances of bias in
fact-checking website, lists all of the sources used for a algorithms to list. Just as consumers expect to see a byline
story. ProPublica’s /nerds blog explains some of the work on stories, because it creates a chain of accountability, they
behind data journalists, developers and reporters’ stories. will soon expect to know how stories were built. Report-
ers aided and augmented by smart systems should explain
what data sets and tools they used. Meanwhile, stories that
were written in part or entirely by computers should reflect
that an algorithm was responsible for the piece of content
being read/ watched.
Watchlist
News organizations everywhere.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 28
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Limited-Edition News Products Later
Watch

BuzzFeed’s BuzzBot was active during the 2016 Re-
publican National Convention.

Some organizations have begun to experiment with tem- We anticipate seeing more temporary podcasts, newslet-
porary products: limited-run newsletters, podcasts that ters and chatbots that are deployed specifically for just one
only last a set number of episodes, live SMS offerings that event. Limited-edition news products are revenue and au-
happen only during events. dience engagement opportunities, as they are vehicles for
data collection and targeted advertising.
Examples
News organizations creating limited-edition news prod- Watchlist
ucts, do not necessarily need to create many labor-inten- News organizations everywhere.
sive, one-off templates and workflows. Producers can de-
velop templates that can be iterated on and redeployed
again. BuzzFeed stood up a temporary chatbot during the
political conventions in 2016, while the New York Times
launched a short-term chat service for the Olympics.
Whether it’s a planned news event (such as local elections,

festivals or races), an annual conference (ONA, SXSW,
PopTech), a season (skiing, football, baseball), or a big sto-
ry that has a defined beginning middle and end (such as a
weather event), limited-edition news products are started
to be used by news organizations.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 29
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
One-To-Few Publishing Later
Watch
Nautil.us is a new breed of website with a highly en-
gaged niche audience that pays for content.

Newsletters, podcasts and niche networks that captivate Our research indicates that more niche networks will con-
smaller audiences made a huge comeback between 2015- tinue to launch with content distributed in myriad formats.
17. What’s next is an expansion to capture even more niche We also expect to see more niche-focused digital-only
audiences. content products—private content networks, short-form
podcasts, and augmented reality integrations—in 2018 and
Examples 2019. Smaller sites like, Nautil.us, Pacific Standard, Bitter
Suddenly, it seems like everyone—from world leaders, to Southerner, New Inquiry and Aeon produce exceptional
your next-door neighbor—has a podcast, newsletter, a chat- content and command very attentive audiences. Our re-
bot or all three. This is due in part to services like Mailchimp, search shows that there is profit to be made, even though
TinyLetter (owned by Mailchimp), Skype, Google Hang- audiences may be smaller in size. As many of the one-to-
outs, Garage Band, SoundCloud, Libsyn, Stitcher, Auphon- few startups have proven in the past 24 months, an influen-
ic, SpeakPipe and a host of affordable smartphone micro- tial network with sticky engagement shows why dedicated
phone attachments. In 2017, new niche media empires took attention matters more than a bunch of clicks, and that’s
root: Jessica Lessin’s The Information publishes in-depth the metric that will matter most in the near future. Adver-
stories on tech and business. Former MTV chief digital of- tisers are taking notice.
ficer Jason Hirschhorn expanded his REDEF newsletter
empire. Watchlist
REDEF Group; The Information; PRX; TinyLetter; Mailchimp;
Nautilus; Pacific Standard; Bitter Southerner; New Inquiry;
Aeon; Backchannel; Skype; Garage Band; SoundCloud; Lib-
syn; Stitcher; Auphonic; SpeakPipe; Twilio; PRI.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 30
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Notification Layer Later
Watch
Key Insight
Notifications show bits of information, including updates, Notification screens are prized real estate.
reminders and messages from friends. They appear on the
lock screens of mobile phones, wearables and connected
devices.
Examples What’s Next

Notifications are particularly attractive to news organiza- The problem is that notifications now come from every-
tions because they capture attention when our attention where—from the OS, government emergency services,
is most vulnerable. Leveraging our FOMO (fear of missing weather apps, games, social networks, podcasts, and
out), notifications tempt us to look at our screens and to more. Notifications with photos and emoji perform better,
click through. Users who opt-in to receive push notifica- which is a show of how cluttered the space has become.
tions increase app retention rates by 2x or more. Opt-in News organizations will need to develop new tactics and
users are twice as likely to engage with the content teased. strategies to ensure that their notifications don’t add to
Most major news organizations, as well as content-creators the existing notification layer clutter—and so they do not
from other sectors, are now engaging notifications to pull alienate readers.
users into content.
Watchlist
News organizations everywhere; Android; Apple; Amazon;
Microsoft.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 31
Keep
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Vigilant
Journalism as a Service (JaaS) Later
Watch
News organizations will find new ways to generate
revenue through Journalism as a Service.

On the fringes, news organizations are beginning to pro- News deployed as a service includes different kinds of par-
vide journalism as a service, rather than solely distributing cels: news stories; APIs; databases that can be used by both
traditional news products. the newsroom and paying third parties; calendar plug-ins
for upcoming news events; systems that can automatical-
Examples ly generate reports using the news org’s archives and da-
“Software as a Service” is a licensing and delivery model, tabases and the like. Services work outside of the social
where users pay for on-demand access. It’s a model that in media landscape, relieving news organizations of revenue
the near-future might be an inevitability. The central chal- sharing and allowing them to fully monetize their services.
lenge within news organizations is that there are immedi-
ate, acute problems—but reasonable solutions will require Watchlist
long-term investment in energy and capital. The tension PRX; Twilio; REDEF Group; The Information; The Coral Pro-
between the two always results in short-term fixes, like ject; MIT Media Lab; ProPublica.
swapping out micro-paywalls for site-wide paywalls. In a
sense, this is analogous to making interest-only payments
on a loan, without paying down the principal. Failing to
pay down the principal means that debt—that problem—
sticks around longer. It doesn’t ever go away. Transitioning
to “Journalism as a Service” enables news organizations to
fully realize their value to everyone working in the knowl-
edge economy—universities, legal startups, data science
companies, businesses, hospitals, and even big tech giants.
News organizations that archive their content are sitting on
an enormous corpus—data that can be structured, cleaned
and used by numerous other groups.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 32
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Transparency in Metrics Later
Watch
Key Insight
Historically, news organizations have kept audience
Social networks are under pressure to offer more transpar- data hidden from staff, while third-party services
ency in the numbers they report back to news organiza- haven’t always been transparent about what numbers
they’re counting.
tions While most companies that publish content on the
web are obsessed with metrics, historically they’ve kept au- Photo Credit: http://www.adoraattack.com/
fuzzy-numbers/
dience data hidden from staff.

Metrics are neither easy to find nor easy to understand for Publishers and advertisers will question the validity of met-
many working inside of content organizations. Facebook rics that they, themselves, cannot verify. Anyone creating
has apologized for misreporting its metrics, which includ- content needs to understand the ebb and flow of traffic
ed displaying incorrect numbers of video plays to adver- and how one piece of content fits into the broader scope
tisers and publishers. The company said that it had been of the organization. We also expect to see news and other
showing incorrect metrics for two years as it attempted to content organizations develop new models to bring trans-
challenge YouTube. Earlier in the year, current and former parency in metrics to staff—without jeopardizing editorial
Facebook staff alleged they were instructed to suppress integrity.
conservative news from the site’s “Trending Topics” area.
During the summer of 2017, Facebook offered new landing Watchlist
page views and page interaction metrics, which the com- Nielsen; Chartbeat; YouTube; Google; Instagram; Snap;
pany said would offer better insights for advertisers. Facebook; Twitter; news organizations everywhere.
It goes without saying that metrics can influence editorial
and business decisions, not to mention how the public in-
terprets the popularity of a story. Most large news organ-
izations have hired audience engagement and analytics
managers as go-betweens.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 33
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Real-Time Fact Checking Later
Watch
The Washington Post has been experimenting with
faster fact-checking.

Buoyed by charges of “fake news,” real-time fact-checking Late in 2016, Google introduced a fact-check tag to its
will be a priority for journalists in 2018. Google News service—readers can see fact checks next to
trending stories. As we now see on a near-daily basis, in-
Examples accuracies and falsehoods quickly spread on social media
Digital tools have made it easy to report on a live event and masquerading as the truth. At least when it comes to cit-
publish in real time, but adding context—such as whether ing numbers and data, artificial intelligence will soon allow
or not a source’s statement is factually accurate—usually news organizations to automate the fact checking process.
happens after. In 2016, the presidential debates were fact In a few years, AI systems will enable more sophisticated
checked by a number of groups, including National Public fact checking: explaining whether information was taken
Radio (NPR), the Washington Post, and even Hillary Clin- out of context, or exaggerated, or downplayed.
ton’s own staff. The efforts were people-powered. In Feb- Our analysis indicates that news organizations will soon
ruary 2017, Washington Post reporters fact checked Presi- have a tremendous opportunity to use AI along with social
dent Trump’s address to Congress with very little lag. media data and their own article databases, to build tools
for real-time fact checking, adding a critical editorial layer
that’s both good for the public interest and good for build-
ing brand reputation.
Watchlist
IBM Watson; Tencent; Baidu; Google; Amazon; Facebook;
Twitter; news organizations everywhere.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 34
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Offline Is The New Online Later
Watch
New techniques allow consumers to access news con-
tent, even when they’re not on a strong network.

As consumers shift to their mobile devices, developers are Until news consumers have ubiquitous access to cheap, fast
making sure their apps work offline. data, offline reading will be a necessity. News organizations
that include seamless, offline experiences will find stickier
Examples audiences.
In the U.S., consumers now spend an average of five hours
a day on their mobile devices. As consumers move about Watchlist
our days—commuting, walking around the office, or sitting Tencent; Baidu; Google Play; Pocket; Amazon; news organ-
through a Little League game—they still find themselves izations everywhere.
offline. A number of news aggregators—including Google,
Smartnews and Apple—want to capitalize on the time con-
sumers devote to their screens, even when the WiFi signal
is weak. The Washington Post’s progressive web app cuts
mobile page load times from 4 seconds to 80 milliseconds
and allows consumers to read news stories without a data
or WiFi connection.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 35
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Audio Search Engines Later
Watch
Audioburst uses artificial intelligence to index audio
broadcasts and make them easier for consumers to
find.
Key Insight ample, if a consumer wants an update on how close the U.S.
is to a conflict with North Korea, she can ask a voice-acti-
As news organizations venture into podcasts, new search
vated app (Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home), which will sift
tools allow the newsroom—as well as news consumers—to
through audio information and deliver a set of clips.
find exactly what information they’re looking for within au-
dio-only content.
What’s Next
Examples With so much funding and development into voice inter-
faces, audio search will quickly become one of the most
While developers have learned how to quickly index and
important tech trends in the years to come.
display web content, digital audio has always remained an
unsolved challenge. Now, rather than searching for a top-
ic and getting a bunch of hyperlinks to click through and Watchlist
listen to, consumers will instead receive a series of buttons Audioburst; Amazon; Google; Apple; Advanced Media; Vi-
that play the exact snippet of audio that’s related to their acom.
search. Better than buttons, consumers can also speak their
searches to a voice assistant and immediately get to the
podcast they were trying to remember, to replay a news
report they’d heard in the car, or to get a series of clips re-
lated to a subject they’re interested in.
Startup Audioburst uses artificial intelligence to index au-

dio broadcasts and make them easier for consumers to
find. Rather than searching for keywords, Audioburst uses
natural language processing to automatically discover the
meaning conveyed and to surface the right content. For ex-


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 36
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
CubeSats Later
Watch
CubeSats can be used alone or stacked to suit the
needs of a specific mission.
Credit: Canadian Space Agency
Key Insight can survey a swath of land to see who’s started drilling and
whether they’ve struck oil. Satellites monitor traffic, polar
Entrepreneurs are building and preparing to launch thou-
ice caps, and even us. Unlike a traditional, large satellite,
sands of low-cost, high-value satellites in the next three
when one CubeSats goes offline or gets damaged, the rest
years. These satellites are small, capable of communicating
of the fleet still works.
with each other, and will photograph every inch of Earth’s
surface every day of the year. Near-real time images, coupled with machine learning and
analysis tools, is big business. Governments, big agricultur-
Examples al corporations, intelligence agencies, shipping companies
Miniature satellites, otherwise known as CubeSats, aren’t and logistics firms all want access, so they’re willing to pay
new technology. They’ve actually been in use by space tens of millions of dollars a year for access. The combined
agencies for years. What’s changing is the launch technol- valuation of companies such as Planet, Airbus D&S, MDA
ogy that lifts CubeSats into orbit. Heavy investment into and DigitalGlobe is well into the tens of billions.
propulsion systems—not to mention significant advance-
ments in technology and cheaper components—are mak- What’s Next
ing it easier to mass-produce tiny satellites in a factory and The Federal Aviation Administration is projecting “an un-
launch them for a variety of purposes. Fleets of CubeSats precedented number” of satellite launches between 2018-
now take photos of farmland and beam them back down 2020. News organizations could gain access to the images
to earth to help farmers assess their crops. Image analysis and tools for data-driven reporting projects and to under-
software can tell big box retailers, such as Best Buy, how stand the world as it’s happening, in real time. CubeSats
many cars are parked in their lots and look for trends over and image analysis will help reporters take the pulse of their
time. They can then do the same with a competitor’s park- cities, gain a deeper view into weather events and dive into
ing lots to gather strategic intelligence. Mining companies criminal activity.

TREND 36
CubeSats cont.
Watchlist
Space Systems Loral; MDA; Planet; Planetary Resources;
Airbus D&S; DigitalGlobe; National Geospatial Intelligence
Agency; 3 Gimbals; Space Exploration Technologies Corp;
Orbital Insight; Google; SpaceKnow; Capella Space Inc;
OneWeb; SpacePharma; Santa Clara University; Technis-
che Universitat Berlin; Tokyo Institute of Technology; Uni-
versity of Tokyo; California Polytechnic University; Cornell
University; Boeing; Delft University of Technology; NASA
Ames Research Center; Transcelestial; NSLComm; Earth-
cube; Aerial & Maritime; Fleet Space; Astrocast; Kepler
Communications; GeoOptics; Hera Systems; Sky and Space
Global; Astro Digital; Kanagawa University; The Aerospace
Corporation; Los Alamos National Lab; NRL Naval Center
for Space; Space and Missile Defense Command; Satellog-
ic; Spire; US Air Force; Lawrence Livermore National Labra-
tory; MIT; Shenzhen Aerospace Donganghong; National
University of Defense Technology (China); Shanghai Engi-
neering Center for Microsatellites (China); SRI International;
Naval Postgraduate School.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TRENDS 37 - 39
Keep
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Vigilant
Video Later
Watch
The digital video ecosystem will continue to grow in
Seventh year on the list Low Degree of Certainty
2018.
Key Insight 37 Connected TVs

U.S. adults now spend close to an hour a day watching on-
TVs that connect to the internet certainly aren’t new. What’s
line video, and increasingly we’re using our mobile phones changed is penetration in average households and the availability
to access that content. But not all adults prefer video. A of streaming apps that bypass the standard list of cable and pub-
Pew Research Center survey3 found that more Americans lic broadcasting channels, such as Amazon Prime Video, Roku,
prefer to watch their news (46%) than to read it (35%) or Hulu, YouTube, Showtime Anytime, iPlayer (UK-only), All 4 (UK
listen to it (17%). But the demographics might surprise you: only), Playstation Now, HBO Now, Direct Now, Plex, iTunes, and
Americans age 50 or older prefer video, while the majority of course, Netflix.
of 18 to 29-year-olds (42%) prefer reading the news. Still,
advertising and marketing budgets are flowing freely to the Impact on news organizations
agencies creating video—and to the platforms distributing Streaming services will erode local broadcast news mar-
it. Mobile video ad spending will reach $18 billion in 2018. kets. These services will also disrupt longer-form television
news broadcasts.
3
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/06/younger-adults-more-likely-than-their-elders-to-prefer-reading-news/

TRENDS 37 - 39
Video cont.
38 WebRTC 39 Streaming Social Video

WebRTC is the real-time communications technology supported Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter all offer live stream-
by Google, Mozilla and Opera, and it powers Google Hangouts. ing video services—to anyone, for free. This means that for the
WebRTC can be used to connect your smartphone to the arti- first time in history, no technical knowledge or specialty equip-
cles you’re reading on your desktop or tablet, displaying different ment is required to broadcast the news. As a result, we are see-
components depending on what offers the best user experience. ing a number of newsworthy events now appearing, completely
If a video won’t display well on your current device, you could be unfiltered, across social media channels: funerals, arrests, political
offered a different version automatically. Because WebRTC works rallies, conference speeches, encounters with public officials.
from the browser, it’s also part of one of the other trends we’re
continuing to watch: connected machines. Impact on news organizations
While everyone can stream—and news organizations now have
Impact on news organizations access to that content—we must ask whether everything should
For news organizations, this means that rather than bridging com- be broadcast. News organizations need a framework to deter-
puters to networks, which must route and relay information along mining whether rebroadcasting a murder, suicide or violent act
various channels, WebRTC and similar peer-to-peer technologies streamed via social video is in the public interest.
could help computers to talk to each other without obstruction.
This may seem like a subtle change in Internet architecture, but
consider the implications: you would no longer need a third-par-
ty operator, like Skype, to video conference with a friend—or to
broadcast live news to consumers. Videos would load and play
faster and would have no need to buffer.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 40
Keep
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Vigilant
New Video and Audio Story Later
Watch
Hardcore Henry is a science fiction movie experienced
Formats Low Degree of Certainty
through the main character’s point of view.
First year on the list

With voice interfaces coming online, and new technologies As consumers become more familiar with mixed reality
such as augmented reality and virtual reality moving from interfaces and devices, the old storytelling formats won’t
the fringe to the mainstream, standard storytelling formats necessarily translate. Audio stories intended for radio won’t
no longer apply. News organizations will start to develop necessarily translate to aggregated clips played on digital
new storytelling formats never used before. assistants, such Amazon’s Echo or Google Home. News
organizations should begin experimenting now with POV
Examples storytelling templates and story formats specifically devel-
Storytellers have started producing stories built specifi- oped for emerging technologies.
cally for immersive environments. In 2016, Lionsgate and
SilVR Thread produced a short action movie featuring a Watchlist
high speed police chase—which viewers experienced virtu- Magic Leap; Amazon; Alphabet; Facebook; Nvidia; Sony;
ally through the central character, played by Emma Rob- NextVR; Curio.io; Oculus; IrisVR; Imax; Microsoft; Samsung;
erts. Hardcore Henry, a science fiction movie about a tele- Qualcomm; Intel; LG; Huawei; Zeiss; Xiaomi; HTC; Lenovo;
kinetic warlord who plans to bioengineer soldiers, was shot HP; YouTube; Jaunt; Pie; Wevr; Cluster; ZeroLight; Hyve.
entirely in the first person point-of-view and was intended
to be viewed in VR.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 41
Keep
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Splinternets Later
Watch
Europe’s “right to be forgotten” laws could mean
widespread splinternets if they aren’t accepted as a
global standard.
Key Insight internet looks and behaves differently depending on geog-

raphy. Citizens in countries where free speech isn’t valued
Twenty years ago, the internet emerged as a global space
could find their version of the internet without a digital out-
where information wanted to be free. Now, everyone has a
let for watchdog journalism.
different idea of how our global information superhighway
ought to be regulated, and by whom. As a result, we are
headed towards a fragmented “splinternet” in the future. What’s Next
The search and social media companies involved have
Examples maintained that they’re “just technology companies,” how-
ever their strictly-defined roles as arbiters of information
Throughout much of the world, search is largely con-
will be tested in courts in the coming years.
trolled by a small number of American companies—there
is no United Nations or other international organizations Without coordinated effort, splinternets will continue to
with any power to establish standards, norms and regu- proliferate in the years ahead. This could make disseminat-
lations that is recognized by everyone using the internet. ing quality journalism more difficult in regions around the
In the past decade, countries in Europe fought ISPs and world. But it could also cause tremendous headaches for
search providers such as Google and Yahoo in court and news organizations who distribute—and monetize—con-
successfully banned content on a country by country ba- tent for a global audience.
sis. In the summer of 2017, Germany passed a law forcing
social media companies to delete hate speech within 24 Watchlist
hours of posting, or pay fines of up to $57 million. Can-
European Union; Google; Facebook; Baidu; Twitter; Am-
ada’s Supreme Court ordered Google to remove pirated
azon; Microsoft; Netflix; Apple; Federal Communications
content from search results. French lawmakers are working
Commission.
to make Europe’s “right to be forgotten” laws applicable
worldwide. The result of this regulation has meant that the


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 42
Keep
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Media Consolidation Later
Watch
News and media organizations are consolidating in
the U.S., due in part to regulatory changes.
Key Insight venture, while Thrillist, NowThis and The Dodo merged
with Seeker, a division of Discovery Communications, and
We are starting to see a handover of sorts: the shrinking of
formed Group Nine Media. Tech startups Newsy and Sto-
traditional media companies just as newer media organiza-
ryful were both acquired by E.W. Scripps and News Corp
tions are consolidated under single owners.
respectively.
Examples It would be difficult to overstate just how much movement
In the past two years, Sinclair, one of America’s largest lo- and consolidation is underway.
cal television station owners, agreed to purchase Tribune
Consolidation efforts have been helped by the Federal
Media for $3.9 billion plus debt, while AT&T agreed to buy
Communications Commission, which under new commis-
Time Warner at a staggering $85 billion. Chicago-based
sioner Ajit Pai has been in the process of changing key
Tronc, which was spun off from Tribune in advance of the
rules. The FCC reinstated what’s called the “UHF discount”
sale to Sinclair, acquired the New York Daily News for $1—
and has made it easier for broadcasters to consolidate
along with the tabloid’s pension liabilities and operational
ownership. It also passed a media ownership order that
debts.
now allows newspaper-broadcast and radio-TV cross-own-
Univision won the bankruptcy auction for Gawker Media ership. It also removes a prohibition against two stations in
Group (and killed Gawker.com after the sale). AT&T, which a market being owned by one entity.
owns DirecTV, considered bids for Starz, Paramount Pic-
tures, and in the end, won Time Warner. Re/code became
part of Vox, which became part of NBC, which a while
back became part of Comcast. Verizon acquired AOL. The
Financial Times was acquired by Nikkei (for a staggering
$1.3 billion). The New York Times acquired The Wirecut-
ter, Complex was acquired by Hearst and Verizon in a joint

TREND 42
Media Consolidation cont.
What’s Next
The next 24 months will be about rapid product creation
and monetization in a rush for investment and exits. By the
year 2021, it’s possible that AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Char-
ter and Amazon will have replaced CBS, Viacom, the New
York Times, Hearst and Conde Nast as the biggest news
and entertainment media brands in the U.S.
Watchlist
The FCC; Comcast NBC Universal; Amazon; Axel Spring-
er; Viacom; Baidu; Bertelsmann; Time Warner; News Corp;
Discovery; Disney; SoftBank Capital; AT&T; Vox; Vice; Net-
flix; Hearst Ventures; Facebook; Twitter; Alphabet; Yomiuri
Shimbun Holdings; Tronc; Sinclair Broadcast Group; CBS
Television; Nextar Broadcasting Group; Raycom Media;
E.W. Scripps; Univision; Cox Media Group; Meredith Corp;
Hubert Burda Media; Asahi Shimbun Company; Microsoft;
Grupo Globo; News Corp; Univision; news organizations
everywhere.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 43
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Blocking the Ad Blockers Later
Watch
Many publishers are now deploying their own ad
blocker-blocking tools.

Ad blockers are software that automagically remove ads Internet researchers have discovered that readers aren’t
from webpages. Typically, they are browser (Chrome, Fire- likely to whitelist sites—it’s not that they object to adver-
fox) extensions. Publishers are now deploying their own ad tising, but rather to seeing inappropriate ads, or to being
blocker-blocking tools. tracked by the code that marketers use. According to in-
ternet tracking service Alexa, Axel Springer’s Bild bounce
Examples rate skyrocketed from 2% up to 40% and time spent on
Often, people who use ad blockers are doing so either be- site down 6%. The other sites have fared no better. Publish-
cause ads slow down a site’s loading time, or because the ers will need to spend time in 2018 developing a different
ads served are offensive, inappropriate for kids, or aren’t strategy for ad blocking, whether that’s allowing readers
safe for work. German publisher Axel Springer released a an incentive for displaying ads, or allowing them to choose
new system that prevented readers from loading the Bild what kind of ads to show. Which also means that publishers
news site until they turned off their ad blockers. Many pub- will need to work closely with ad serving companies and
lishers are following suit, asking readers to whitelist their online advertisers to ensure that the right kinds of ads are
sites in order to read or watch content. Still, there are ways being shown.
of getting to their content (RSS, “reading mode,” or incog-
nito/ private mode within browsers). Watchlist
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB); retargeting compa-
nies (Criteo; AdRoll); marketing automation software (Mar-
keto, Eloqua, Hubspot, Oracle, IBM Unica), creative optimi-
zation companies (AdExtent; CPXi); agency trading desks
(Cadreon, Xaxis); exchanges (OpenX, doubleclick); media
planning; ad networks (Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook); tar-
geted networks; mobile-specific networks.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 44
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Natural Language Generation for Later
Watch
NLG can be used to help readers of all levels engage
Reading Levels Low Degree of Certainty
with a story.
Second year on the list Credit: Illustration by Narrative Science.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a processing task, As news organizations search for new revenue streams,
where computers generate the kind of language humans NLG will be used not just to write stories—but to create
would use in a designated situation. NLG can be used to different versions for audiences with varying reading skills.
rewrite content for a variety of different reading levels. That’s because the basic corpus—the data that makes
up the story—wouldn’t change, but the vocabulary and
Examples amount of detail could be adjusted. For example, a single
Many companies—including Credit Suisse, Deloitte, and story about the results of Berkshire Hathaway’s quarter-
a number of news organizations—were already using ly earnings could be rendered in many different ways: for
Narrative Science, an NLG provider. A basic set of data finance professionals, for high school economics classes,
was processed with an NLG algorithm to produce a reada- for beginning English as a second language learners, and
ble story, which sounded no different than if a human had for MBA students in non-English speaking countries. Using
written it. NLG to custom-write different version of stories enables
media organizations to scale their operations for new audi-
ences worldwide—without hiring additional staff.
Watchlist
Arria NLG; Narrative Science; Expect Labs; Automated In-
sights; Department of Computing Science, University of
Aberdeen; School of Science and Engineering, University
of Dundee; Research Center on Information Technologies
(CiTIUS), University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain;
School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 45
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Leaking Later
Watch
Expect more coordinated leaking efforts in the year
ahead.
Key Insight more. The records, known as a the “Panama Papers,” were
sent from a little-known law firm in Panama. In the sum-
2017 was the year of leaks. Presidents accused staff of leak-
mer of 2017, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security
ing confidential information to the press. WikiLeaks contin-
and Governmental Affairs issued a report entitled “State
ued dumping information on the internet. Political activists
Secrets: How an Avalanche of Media Leaks Is Harming Na-
prevented leaks from other political activists from enter-
tional Security” and cited 125 stories with leaked informa-
ing the public. While many people seem eager to find and
tion that the committee considered damaging to national
share information—not everyone agrees on what should be
security.
published, and by whom.

We expect to see more coordinated leaking efforts in the
The most famous leak in modern history happened when
year ahead. News organizations are starting to develop se-
former National Security Agency contractor Edward
cure drops for would-be leakers, while individual reporters
Snowden leaked thousands of sensitive government doc-
are increasingly using encrypted networks to send and re-
uments. U.S. Army Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley)
ceive sensitive information. Now would be a good time for
Manning uploaded a mountain of classified military and
news organizations to develop collaborative partnerships
diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, which has become
and workflows ahead of the next leak. We also see an op-
the politically-embattled bastion for leakers. In Octo-
portunity for data journalists and for those with specialized
ber 2016, the U.S. government officially accused Russia
skill sets, adept at organizing and parsing structured data.
of hacking into the Democratic National Committee and
Their particular talents will be in greater demand in the
releasing sensitive emails. Meanwhile, the International
years ahead. Finally, news organizations should strategize
Consortium of Investigative Journalists—a collaboration
now on ethical standards regarding leaks.
between 370 journalists from 76 countries—spent a year
reporting on a massive cache of 11.5 million leaked records
showing the offshore holdings of 140 politicians from Watchlist
around the world, 12 current and former world leaders, and News organizations worldwide.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 46
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
The First Amendment Later
Watch
Legal scholars don’t all agree on how to protect free
in a Digital Age Low Degree of Certainty
speech in a digital age.
Second year on the list

It may seem odd to include the Bill of Rights, which were The problem isn’t just limited to the U.S. In 2015, a bot pro-
ratified 227 years ago, in an emerging tech trends report. grammed by Amsterdam-based Jeffrey van der Groot au-
But recent discoveries in how our technology renders tonomously wrote and tweeted a death threat, which re-
speech will result in First Amendment challenges in the sulted in Dutch police having to figure out whether or not
years to come. a criminal charge was even possible. As of September 2017,
there were more than a dozen active lawsuits challenging
Examples hate speech distributed via digital media. Our analysis in-
In the aftermath of violent, racist demonstrations at a dicates that there will be legal challenges worldwide in the
“Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, GoDaddy and next several years. This will exacerbate the emerging trend
Google dropped services to neo-Nazi websites. In March of splinternets—see page 53.
2016, Microsoft’s Tay.ai bot went on an anti-Semitic, hom-
ophobic, racist rampage. The bot was decommissioned Watchlist
within 24 hours, but screenshots of its automatically-gen- European Union; Federal Communications Commission;
erated tweets are all over the internet. It proved to be a Google; Facebook; Microsoft; Apple; Amazon; Snap; Ins-
temporary headache for Microsoft, but the legal questions tagram; YouTube; Twitch; broadcasters; newspapers; radio
continue to perplex Twitter, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, stations; digital media organizations; Jack Balkin, Knight
YouTube and Twitch. How does the free speech apply to Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment
bots? Who’s libel? The bot? The bot’s well-meaning devel- at Yale Law School; Margot Kaminski, Assistant Professor,
oper? The brand? The First Amendment clearly applies to Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.
the government suppression of speech—but does it relate
at all to speech distributed by ISPs and search engines?


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 47
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Personal Networks Later
Watch
Key Insight
Signal is an encrypted network.
In reaction to trolls, leaking and security breaches, su-
per-private networks are launching.

Personal networks are gaining momentum, though they If personal networks continue to gain traction, news or-
are not new. Many closed networks have failed to find a ganizations might experiment with distributing content
strong base of users. Some to watch: Alively, a private net- throughout a closed network. Different from a paywall, a
work to share videos; Nextdoor, a network for neighbor- closed network would not allow search engines to index
hoods; MeWe, which offers private social networking and content—but it could allow for sharing news stories and
file sharing; and Signal, which is an encrypted network for closed-circuit comments among trusted or premium mem-
small groups. In addition to these networks, there has been bers of a community.
experimentation into peer-2-peer, distributed internet sys-
tems. In 2015, BitTorrent released a public beta of Project Watchlist
Maelstrom, a web browser built on the same underlying BitTorrent; Nextdoor; Alively; MeWe; Signal
technology as BitTorrent. Some argue that a distributed
browser system could prevent an ISP from throttling cer-
tain sites or users. Maelstrom also allowed content to be
published that doesn’t actually live on a server—rather, your
browser connected to others online who are also viewing
the site or who have viewed it recently.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TRENDS 48 - 51
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Mixed Reality Later
Watch
Microsoft’s Hololens is an example of a mixed reality
headset.
Key Insight Bottom Line

Hologram technology is still in development and too early
Mixed Reality (MR) combines the physical and digi-
for news organizations.
tal realms and encompasses a number of technologies:
augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), 360-degree
video and holograms. 49 Virtual Reality
What You Need To Know About MR Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer simulated environment. As a
AR, VR, 360-degree video and holograms aren’t new. But tethered experience, VR is experienced wearing a pair of goggles,
in the year ahead, we’ll see more devices being made avail- and it can simulate sensations of being physically present in the
able to consumers at affordable prices—and we’ll see a scenes a user is viewing. VR can be experienced untethered as
well, by slipping a mobile phone into a special mask. In 2017, a
number of new content providers building out stories and
number of headsets went on sale from Google, Microsoft, HTC,
experiences for each platform. This is a prioritized summa-
Oculus and Sony. Because the environment is still very new, with
ry, based on our research and analysis, of how news organ- relatively few content offerings, the relative value of VR HMDs
izations should invest their time and money. (aside from Google’s Daydream View) isn’t yet attractive for av-
erage consumers.
48 Holograms
Bottom Line
In the summer of 2017, researchers at the University of Roch- The VR marketplace isn’t mature enough for widespread
ester unveiled the Illumyn 3-D Display, a system that uses la- adoption, and storytelling options are limited for news or-
ser projection to generate 3D images in midair—sort of. They’re
ganizations. VR presents greater opportunities for enter-
contained in air that’s enclosed within a glass sphere filled with
tainment, movies, shows and gaming.
a metallic vapor. RED, the professional camera maker, built a ho-
lographic phone called the Hydrogen that generates holograms.
Microsoft’s long-awaited and much-hyped Hololens headset and
SDK became available for developers in 2017.

Mixed Reality Technologies Offering The Biggest
Opportunities For News
TRENDS 48 - 51
Hologram VR 360-degree AR
Mixed Reality cont. The least opportunity for news The biggest opportunity for news
Fourth year on the list
50 360-degree Video 51 Augmented Reality

360-degree video is created with a special camera system capa- Augmented Reality (AR) doesn’t simulate an entirely new en-
ble of recording 360 degrees of a scene simultaneously. Once the vironment, but rather overlays information right onto your field
video is rendered, viewers can use a mouse, their fingers, or ges- of vision. But you need a lens and screen of some kind, whether
ture to watch the video from any perspective or angle. YouTube, that’s a mobile phone or a pair of glasses. In 2017, every major
Facebook and Vimeo offer 360-degree videos, and we expect tech company, from Alphabet to Facebook to Snap, made big
more platforms to offer it in the year ahead. announcements about investing heavily in the future of AI. Mean-
time, Magic Leap, which continues to raise investment funding,
Bottom Line launched its developers platform—and it will be using a new kind
Because 360-degree videos don’t require separate hard- of lightfield chip. Magic Leap projects light directly into the user’s
ware for viewing, it offers a cost-effective alternative to VR eye, which makes it seem as though digital objects exist in the
that has greater market potential. real world.
Bottom Line
AR offers the greatest market potential for news organizations in
the near-future.

Virtual Vocabulary
A mini-glossary for the mixed reality terms news organizations will need to know in 2018.
Cinematic VR Head tracking

VR created with video and images from the real world. (The Some HMDs are equipped with special sensors that track
alternative is computer-generated graphics.) the exact movements of the user’s head. The sensors then
send feedback to the system, which moves the images and
Eye tracking audio a user experiences in her field of vision in real-time.
A system that can read the position of the user’s eyes while
using VR. Eye tracking software allows a user to aim cor- In-ear monitors (IEM)
rectly with her head while in a simulation. These are earbuds that work with head mounted displays
that don’t offer built-in headphones.
Field of view (FoV)
What a user can see in her visual field while in a simula- Latency
tion. The viewing angle for an average, healthy human eye Sometimes, the system isn’t capable of showing the images
is about 200 degrees, so a field of view close to or greater in exact synchronization with the user. When that happens,
than that is optimal, because it creates a true sense of being a user moves her head, but the images she’s seeing lag be-
within an environment. hind a few fractions of a second. This lag is a reason why
some people experience “simulation sickness.”
Haptics
In addition to a VR headset, hand-held controllers are often Presence
used. Some are equipped with haptic feedback, which gives When a user feels as though she’s fully immersed within
the user the sensation of touching something in the simu- a simulation, like she’s actually there, she’s achieved “pres-
lated environment or receiving touch-back reactions. ence.”
Head mounted display (HMD) Refresh rate

This is the headset you’ve seen people wearing. It typically How quickly the images are updated. Higher refresh rates
includes a strap both around and over the head, which se- cut down on latency and provide a more realistic simula-
cures the screen to your face. Some HMDs include built-in tion. Ideal refresh rates are above 60 frames per second.
headphones as well as sensors for head tracking.

Virtual Vocabulary cont.
A mini-glossary for the mixed reality terms news organizations will need to know in 2018.
Room scale
This is the tethered version of VR that offers users the capa-
bility of walking around a room and interacting with virtual
items, as they walk around in the physical world. So if you
take a step in the real world, you’re also taking a step in
the virtual simulation. For this to work, rooms need to be
mapped in advance.
Social VR
When two or more people are wired in to a VR simulation
and able to share the experience by observing each other,
interacting or participating in joint activities.
Stitching
The process of combining video from different cameras into
one, spherical video suitable for VR. This typically requires a
tremendous amount of editing to fill in gaps, reorient scenes
and seamlessly meld video streams so that the simulation
looks authentic.
VR face
When a user has been in a simulation, a few things happen:
the head mounted display tends to leave a temporary im-
print on the skin, not unlike a pair of swimming goggles.
Users also tend to relax into a slack-jawed look, with their
mouths slightly agape.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TRENDS 52 - 60
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Security and Privacy Later
Watch
DARPA’s new Cyber Grand Challenge asks hackers to
build systems that can hack faster than humans.
Key Insight 52 Differential Privacy

A lack of planning and oversight led to significant cyber
This is a technique that collects a vast amount of data from users,
attacks—on government, businesses and individuals—in and then employs an algorithm to scramble that data so that it
the past year. Meanwhile, ongoing breaches have contin- cannot be traced back to each individual. Differential privacy is
ued to dismantle the public trust. According to Pew, 86% typically used alongside machine learning to study a large group
of Americans say that they have taken intentional steps to in order to spot emerging trends. Early in 2016, Apple announced
remove or mask their digital footprints, because they are that it would be using differential privacy, which may have sound-
concerned about protecting their privacy. They exhibited ed initially like a new security system. It is, in a sense—Apple will
a deep lack of faith in organizations—from email providers, be studying our data to shore up its operating system and net-
to search engines and government agencies—promising to works. Apple’s late-fall macOS High Sierra update uses differen-
safeguard their privacy. According to the report: “While half tial privacy technology in the browser to gather information as
of those surveyed said they felt confident they understood users visit compromised websites. What the company learns will
how their information would be used, 47% said they were eventually trickle back down to users.
not, and many of these people felt confused, discouraged
or impatient when trying to make decisions about shar- 53 Trolls
ing their personal information with companies.4” It’s only This most recent political season brought the worst out in human-
a matter of time before news organizations face a breach. ity. Throughout 2017, there was continued fallout in social media
and websites that promote hate speech and racism. This behav-
ior has been normalized by several elected officials in the U.S.
and Europe, which means darker days are still ahead. There may
be a tiny bit of light: a subsidiary of Google named Jigsaw has
released a set of projects that use machine learning to identify
the language of abuse and harassment, help protect news sites
against distributed denial of service attacks, and offer peer-to-
peer private networks to bypass government censorship. See
also: WebRTC and Personal Networks trends.
4
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/21/the-state-of-privacy-in-america/

TRENDS 52 - 60
Security and Privacy cont. Apple uses differential privacy to protect data.
54 Authenticity 56 Backdoors
In the wake of the fake news epidemic—and the recent phenom- While they sound malicious, backdoors aren’t necessarily bad.
enon of discrediting legitimate news sources—authenticity will be Often, developers intentionally install them into firmware so that
paramount in the digital information ecosystem. Expect to see manufacturers can safely upgrade our devices and operating
new networks and third party services offering verification and systems. The challenge is that backdoors can also be used sur-
authenticity, proving that the content and sources are reliable and reptitiously to harness everything from our webcams to our per-
accurate, even if they are anonymous. sonal data. In 2018, government officials will continue advocating
for a set of “golden keys,” which would allow law enforcement to
55 Data Retention Policies break through the security using backdoors. Opponents argue
that the simple act of creating a backdoor would leave ordinary
Many organizations—from financial institutions to universities, people vulnerable to everyday attacks by even unskilled hackers.
hospitals, veterinarians, churches, Fortune 500 companies and More journalists are using encryption tools for reporting, and
beyond—store data for compliance, business or customer con- news organizations now offer secure drops for whistleblowers to
venience. News organizations store customer data, internet traffic upload documents and files. Newsrooms will likely be drawn into
and mobile metrics as well as employee performance reports and the battle for backdoors in the future.
archives of content. In the year 2018, every news organization—
and every third party service provider they work with—will need
to address best practices in data retention, with an eye toward
security. You would be surprised to know how few organizations
have responsive data retention policies that are updated accord-
ing to security issues—and for that matter, how many news organ-
izations don’t even have policies at all.

TRENDS 52 - 60
Security and Privacy cont.
57 Prize Hacks The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel. The Guard-
ian subsequently shared the documents with The New York
The past three years have been dramatically successful for hack- Times. The five news organizations reported on the trove and
ers, motivated by geopolitical forces and corporate scandals. made parts of if available on their websites. In the years since
To date, attacks that have made big headlines have been about publication, Wikileaks appears to have pivoted away from its
hackers taking our data—but exploits can also mean infiltrating original mission to target political action. In July 2016, Wikileaks
the computer systems in our newsrooms. Security expert Brian published 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Com-
Krebs says that the “market for finding, stockpiling and hoard- mittee. By fall 2017, the Obama Administration named Russia as
ing (keeping secret) software flaws is expanding rapidly” and the source of the hacked data, citing Russian President Vladimir
went so far as to advocate for a compulsory bounty program. Putin’s desire to influence the U.S. presidential election. What
In response, a number of white hat (read: good hacker) bug happens when a government leaks a cache of sensitive informa-
bounty programs are becoming popular. HackerOne is being tion on Wikileaks, with the intent of destabilizing another nation?
used by Airbnb, Nintendo, WordPress, Snap, Starbucks, Uber, Wikileaks becomes weaponized.
Spotify and the Department of Defense, among others. News
organizations might consider partnering with friendly hackers to 59 Glitches
hunt down potential vulnerabilities in their networks, apps and
systems. Glitches are problems that don’t have an immediate, obvious
cause but nonetheless can cause frustrating problems. In the
58 Weaponizing Wikileaks past year, glitches have caused a three-hour stop at the Nasdaq,
they’ve grounded entire Southwest Airlines and Delta fleets, and
When it launched in 2006, Wikileaks described itself as a “not- they’ve halted trading at the New York Stock Exchange. In many
for-profit media organization” with the sole purpose of distrib- cases, glitches have to do with degraded network connectivity
uting primary source documents from anonymous sources. In or a miscalculation of the bandwidth needed. But a lot of times,
2010, Wikileaks started releasing a trove of 750,000 diplomatic glitches have to do with newer technologies, which we are learn-
cables, videos and documents, many of which were classified. ing break in unexpected ways. News organizations and tech-
Wikileaks partnered with journalists in four news organizations: nology companies servicing the journalism ecosystem should
prepare for glitches in the coming years.

TRENDS 52 - 60
Security and Privacy cont.
60 Ownership
Who owns all those videos you’re uploading to YouTube, Twitch,
Instagram and Facebook? Through its advertising program, a lot
of individual people and organizations make substantial money
from the videos they upload, but there is nothing preventing
someone from copying that video and uploading it to another
platform. Because of the inherent sociability of outside plat-
forms, videos may garner millions of views—without any renu-
meration going back to the original content creator. As news
organizations upload troves of videos to social networks—and as
they rebroadcast videos from consumers—legal experts world-
wide will question who owns the rights to all that data.

Hacker Terms and Lingo Every Journalist Should Know For 2018
Adware Bot
Software that automatically generates online ads; it can Bots are automated programs that performs a simple task.
also include spyware that tracks your browsing habits. It’s Some—simple chatbots, for example—are completely harm-
because of adware that many people are turning to ad less. Other bots can be programmed to repeatedly guess
blocking software. (see the earlier “Blocking the Ad Block- passwords so that a hacker can break into a website.
ers” trend.)
Botnet
Anonymous A botnet is a group of computers that are being controlled
A collective of hackers, best known for its use of the Guy by a third party, and are being used for any number of nefar-
Fawkes mask and distributed denial of service (DDoS) at- ious purposes. For example, malware installed on your com-
tacks. Anonymous typically uses the hashtag #Ops when puter can run, undetected, in the background while hackers
announcing a new campaign. Past ops included a takedown use your machine as part of a large spamming network.
of the Church of Scientology and the Westboro Baptist
Church. Brute force attack
This type of attack is a laborious, methodical process where
Attribution a hacker uses software to automatically guess every pass-
Researching and tracking back the origins of an attack. word it can to gain unauthorized entry into a network or
computer.
Backdoor
Developers intentionally install backdoors into firmware so Bug
that manufacturers can safely upgrade our devices and op- A flaw or problem in a program that can be harmless or
erating systems. The challenge is that backdoors can also might allow hackers to exploit a system.
be used surreptitiously to harness everything from our web-
cams to our personal data. Compiler
A program that translates source code into executable ma-
Black hat chine language. Compilers are used to surreptitiously allow
A malicious hacker; someone who hacks for personal gain. hackers into various systems without changing the source
code, making it easier for them to get into a computer or
network without being noticed.

Cookie Distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)

A small file sent from your computer’s web browser to a This is a DoS using a battalion of machines.
server. Cookies help websites recognize you when you re-
turn, and they also help third parties track audience. DEF CON
This is a big, annual conference for hackers that attracts peo-
Cracking ple from all over the world. Discussions range from highly
A basic term that describes breaking into a security system. technical and academic to those about policy. It takes place
Anyone “cracking” a system is doing so maliciously. in Las Vegas every August.
Crypto Digital certificate

Cryptography (or “crypto”) is the art and science of en- These authenticate and approve the identity of a person,
crypting data—as well as breaking encryption. organization or service.
Deep web/net and Dark web/ net Doxing

The deep and dark net/web are actually two different things, When hackers root out and publish personally-identifying
though they’re often conflated. The deep net or deep web information about someone online.
is the vast trove of data that isn’t indexed by search engines.
Spreadsheets, databases and more that are stored on serv- Dump
ers make up this space. The dark web/ net is made up of The term for a trove of data released by hackers.
sites that are invisible unless you know how to use a special Dumpster diving
network, such as Tor, which knows how to find the dark side. Organizations and individuals who don’t consistently use a
Once there, you’ll find what you might expect: pirated soft- shredder are opening themselves to dumpster diving, which
ware and content, job ads for hackers, illegal drugs, human is exactly what it sounds like: hackers go through garbage
trafficking, and worse. looking for any information that will help with an exploit.
Denial of service attack (DoS) Encryption
This is when a hacker sends so many requests to a web- Using special code or software to scramble data so that it
site or network that the traffic temporarily overwhelms the cannot be read by a third party, even if it is intercepted.
servers, and the site or network goes down.

End-to-end encryption InfoSec

When an encrypted message is scrambled on both ends, as This is an abbreviation for “information security.” Compa-
it is sent and again as it is received. nies and professions that work within cybersecurity are
known as InfoSec.
Exploit
The general term for leveraging a vulnerability in a piece of IRC
code, software, hardware or computer network. Internet relay chat protocol (IRC) has been around forever.
It’s the communication system used to have conversations
Firewall and share files, and it’s still used by hackers.
A system of software and hardware that’s designed to pre-
vent unauthorized access to a computer or computer net- Jailbreak
work. A way of removing the restrictive manufacturer’s code from
a device so that you can reprogram it to function as you
Grey hat desire.
Hackers are just like the rest of us. Some have malicious
intent, others just want to fight the bad people, and some... Keys
have a certain tolerance for moral flexibility. Gray hats will The code that, just like a physical key, is used to lock or un-
use the tools and sensibilities of a black hat in the pursuit lock a system, encrypted message or software.
of justice.
Lulz
Hacker A play on “lol” or “laughing out loud,” black hats often use
This term means different things to different people. People the term “lulz” to justify malicious work. LulzSec (“lulz se-
who tinker with code, to purposely manipulate it, are hack- curity”) is yet another offshoot of Anonymous, and it was
ers. Some are good, and some are bad. In popular culture, credited with the massive Sony Pictures hack.
“hacker” has taken on a distinctly negative connotation.
Malware
Hactivist Any software program that’s been designed to manipulate
Someone who hacks for social or political reasons. a system, by stealing information, augmenting code or in-
stalling a rogue program. Rootkits, keyloggers, spyware and
everyday viruses are examples of malware.

Man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks PGP

This occurs when a hacker impersonates a trusted connec- PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy,” and you’ve probably
tion in order to steal data or information or to alter commu- seen a lot of PGP numbers showing up in Twitter and Face-
nications between two or more people. book bios lately. PGP is a basic method of encrypting email
(and other data). In oder to receive and read the message,
Metadata your intended recipient must use a private key to decode it.
This is the data that explains what’s in another set of data,
such as a jpeg photo, or an email, or a webpage. Phishing
We’ve all seen a phishing attack at least once. They usually
Password managers come in the form of an email from a trusted contact. Once
These are third-party tools that you entrust your passwords you open the message or attachment, your computer, your
to. Just remember one master password, and use it to un- data and the network you’re on become vulnerable to at-
lock a database of all your other passwords, which should tack.
allow you to use a completely different password for every
site and service you use. While managers are a good idea Plaintext
in theory, many are cloud-based. If a hacker gains access This is text without any formatting. In the context of cyber-
to your password manager, you’re in big trouble. If you do security, it also refers to text that isn’t encrypted. Sony Pic-
use one, make sure to use complicated password at least tures storing its passwords and email addresses in a basic
36 characters long with lots of special characters, numbers Excel spreadsheet is an example of plaintext.
and capital letters.
Pwned
Payload South Park fans will remember Cartman using this word. It’s
The part of a computer virus that is responsible for the pri- geek speak for “dominate.” If you’ve been hacked, you’ve
mary action, such as destroying data or stealing informa- been pwned.
tion.
RAT
Penetration testing RATs are Remote Access Tool. If you’ve used a remote login
The practice of trying to break into your own computer or service to access your office computer while away from work,
network, in order to test the strength of your security. you’ve used a RAT. But RATs can be malicious, too. Just im-
agine a hacker using a RAT to take over your workstation.

Ransomware amples of sniffers, which are designed to find signals and

This is malware that allows a hacker to break into your com- data without being detected.
puter or network and then take away your access until you
pay a specified fee or perform a certain action. Spearphishing
A more targeted form of phishing to smaller groups, typi-
Root cally within social networks or work environments.
The root is the central nervous system of a computer or net-
work. It can install new applications, create files, delete user Spoofing
accounts and the like. Anyone with root access has ubiqui- In general, anytime data is changed to mimic a trusted
tous and unfettered access. source, it’s being spoofed. Changing the “From” section or
header of an email to make it look as though it was sent
Rootkit by someone else. Black hats spoof emails by impersonating
Rootkits are malware designed for root access. Often unde- people you know, and then launch phishing attacks.
tected, rootkits start running when you start your computer,
and they stay running until you turn your machine off. Token
A small physical device that allows a trusted, authenticated
Shodan user to use a service. Tokens are stronger than passwords
In Japan, a “shodan” is considered the first degree (read: alone, since they require both the password and the physi-
lowest level) of mastery. In cyberspace, Shodan is a search cal device to gain access.
engine for connected devices, allowing hackers access to
baby monitors, medical devices, thermostats and any other Tor
connected device. It’s intended to help people learn how The Tor Browser, otherwise known as “Tor,” was originally
to secure their devices, but obviously it can also be used developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to route
against them. (see http://shodan.io) traffic in random patterns so as to confuse anyone trying
to trace individual users. The Tor Project is the nonprofit
Sniffing now in charge of maintaining Tor, which is used by both
When you were a kid, if you drove around your neighbor- white and black hackers, as well as journalists and security
hood looking for open WiFi networks, you probably used a experts.
little device or a special computer program. Those are ex-

Verification
Ensuring that data, and its originators, are authentic.
VPN – Virtual Private Networks, or “VPNs,” use encryption
to create a private channel for accessing the internet. VPNs
are necessary when connecting to public networks—even
those at airports, hotels and coffee shops.
Virus
Malware intended to steal, delete or ransom your files. Mim-
icking the flu, this type of malware spreads like a virus.
White hat
Not all hackers are bad. White hats work on highlighting
vulnerabilities and bugs in order to fix them and protect us.
Worm
Worms are a certain kind of invasive malware that spreads
like a virus.
Zero-day exploits
In the hacking community, zero days (also written as
“0day”) are prized tools because they are undisclosed vul-
nerabilities that can be exploited. Once the flaw is revealed,
programmers have zero days to do anything about it.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 61
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Organizational Doxing Later
Watch
Journalists should prepare for hackers posting their
personal information online.

“Doxing” is mining and publishing personal information Because of the success hackers had in recent years, we can
about a person—organizational doxing is when this hap- expect more organizational doxing ahead—and news or-
pens to an entire company. It’s a term introduced by secu- ganizations are vulnerable. Every executive team must de-
rity expert Bruce Schneier. velop a risk management plan should they find themselves
doxed. We strongly recommend reading the “Organization-
Examples al Doxing and Disinformation” blog post by Bruce Schneier:
In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, we’ve seen a https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/organi-
number of data dumps. WikiLeaks has published troves zational_1.html.
of data. Hackers broke into Hacking Team, publishing a
massive amount of internal data. Sony has been breached, Watchlist
and so have various branches of the U.S. government. Schneier on Security; Twitter; Anonymous; Russia; China;
government agencies; news organizations everywhere.
This isn’t about stealing credit card information, but rather
about making public the personal details of individuals,
either to protest against policies, to embarrass compa-
nies or to blackmail companies into paying big ransoms
to hackers.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 62
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Blockchain For Journalism Later
Watch
Blockchain technology could make it easier for news-
rooms to solicit and receive sensitive information from
whistleblowers.
Key Insight the need for an intermediary between buyers and sellers.
But it potentially eliminates the need for all intermediaries
Blockchain is the transaction database that’s shared by
in most transactions.
everyone participating in bitcoin’s digital system. The
blockchain is a public ledger of transactions.
What’s Next
Examples We’re entering the beginning of the decentralized inter-
net—as well as an era of interoperability problems. While
Bitcoins are mined using powerful computers and scripts.
you most often hear about blockchains in relation to cur-
In this digital currency system, bitcoin is the protocol partic-
rency and financial markets, this technology has poten-
ipating on the blockchain public ledger. Virtually everyone
tial uses for journalism, too. One possible promise for
agrees that bitcoins probably aren’t the blockchain’s killer
blockchain could be verification and encryption, to make
app. The blockchain is a sort of distributed consensus sys-
it easier for newsrooms to solicit and receive sensitive in-
tem, where no one person controls all the data. Some say
formation from whistleblowers. It could also be used to
that the blockchain will soon herald a new kind of Internet.
guarantee the authenticity of sources, images and videos.
The cryptography team at Blockstream recently launched
In the future, there could be a public ledger for news — a
its first prototype “sidechain,” which functions as a separate
network system that would exchange authentic news and
ledger with its own code. Sidechains allow for easier au-
parse out fake news5.
thentication, they enhance privacy, and add functions like
contracts and confidential transactions. Blockstream and
the sidechain projects that follow will turn the blockchain Watchlist
into a universal platform that can be used for anything re- Blockstream; Factom; Tierion; Bitcoin; Ethereum; Block-
quiring signatures or authentication. It will therefore enable stack; Omni Layer; CoinSpark; BlockApps; Monetas; Neuro-
people to participate in “trustless” transactions, eliminating ware; Bitcore; Coinbase; MultiChain; Cosmos.
5
This summary is excerpted from an interview Amy Webb gave to the Global Editors Network.
https://medium.com/global-editors-network/what-will-make-the-futures-of-journalism-gen-supports-amy-webb-in-finding-out-d2f85949de6d


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TRENDS 63 - 69
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Drones Later
Watch
The 2016 Super Bowl halftime show featured a drone
swarm.
Key Insight 64 Drone Lanes

You’ve probably seen at least one in the wild, and your
Amateur drone pilots continue to cause trouble for commer-
newsroom might even employ a drone pilot. Drones are cial and private airline pilots. Currently, the FAA does not allow
now available in an array of sizes and form factors, from drones to fly near the airspace of airports—but while there are
lightweight planes and copters, to tiny machines no bigger no-fly zones, there aren’t no-fly circumstances. Meantime, news
(or louder) than a hummingbird. Soon, they’ll include pow- organizations hope to use drones for reporting in the public inter-
erful sense and avoid technology, and the ability to fly on est, while commercial operators like Amazon want to begin drone
their own. deliveries. Law enforcement agencies in North Dakota will begin
flying drones armed with anything from tear gas to Tasers, thanks
63 Sense And Avoid Technology to a new law passed late 2015. From the Valley to DC, everyone will
be talking about whether or not the airspace should be regulat-
Robots harnessing neural networks and artificial intelligence can ed for hobbyists and commercial drone pilots, which will prompt
make inferences and decisions when programmed to do so. That’s difficult conversations between technologists, researchers, drone
because of sense and avoid technology. In 2018, drones will be manufacturers, businesses and the aviation industry, since each
programmed to navigate along the path of GPS waypoints—and has an economic stake in the future of unmanned vehicles. We
they’ll make decisions midair about the best path to take and anticipate the sky being divided soon: hobbyist pilots will have
when to avoid objects like buildings, trees and mountains. Or oth- access to operate UMVs in the 200 and below space, while busi-
er drones, for that matter. nesses and commercial pilots will gain exclusive access to 200 -
400 feet zone overhead.
64 Drone Swarms
66 Clandestine, Disappearing Drones
Hundreds of micro-drones can be deployed at once and are now
capable of moving as one, technological organism in the sky. In 2016, DARPA funded new research in drones capable of making
They’re so fast, that cameras have a difficult time capturing them deliveries—and then disappearing into thin air. The agency’s Van-
in real-time. This technology was developed by the military, and ishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program has already
it could eventually have commercial and news applications. If you shown that it’s possible to program a small chip to shatter on
watched Lady GaGa’s Super Bowl halftime show, you saw a drone command. What’s coming next is sort of like Snapchat for drones.
swarm in action at the very beginning.

TRENDS 63 - 69
Drones cont.
68 Microdrones
Microdrones will autonomously navigate through tiny spaces to
investigate collapsed buildings or areas with hazardous materials.
In the U.S., there are no-fly zones, In October 2016, the U.S. Army asked for bids to supply short-
but legally there aren’t yet no-fly range microdrones, capable of reconnaissance and still small
enough to fit in a soldier’s uniform pocket. These same drones—
circumstances which can crawl, swim and fly—will one day be used by journalists
for reporting in conflict zones and natural disasters.
67 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) 69 Drone Delivery

Researchers at MIT have developed underwater drones with Towards the end of 2016, commercial drone deliveries launched.
cognitive capabilities, called AUVs. After giving them a series U.S.-based Zipline brought its drone delivery system to Rwanda,
of parameters—how far to stray, how far above the seafloor to where it delivered vital blood supplies. UPS, Amazon and DHL
move, what to explore and the like—these drones can function all tested their own fleets of drones. Legislation will soon catch
on their own. If something unforeseen happens which impedes up with the technology. We anticipate that aviation authorities
the drone’s ability to complete its designated task, it can decide will start to act in 2019-2020, at which point commercial drone
whether to continue or to return to base. AUVs can be used for deliveries will finally take flight in earnest. This means lots of new
a host of purposes, from environmental mapping and texting, to stories to cover, especially for reporters working logistics and
military support (like hunting for a downed plane). Some have business beats—and it potentially means the end of newspaper
suggested AUVs might be used for more nefarious purposes, like delivery by humans.
transporting illegal goods.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TRENDS 70 - 73
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Wearables Later
Watch
The Bragi Dash earables double as a personal assistant.
Key Insight 70 Head Mounted Displays

As of October 2017, the Future Today Institute is tracking
Virtual reality headsets are wearable devices. What’s next: they
536 wearable devices, in various stages of development— will soon collect your biometric data and other personal informa-
from fringe experimentation to mass-market sales. The tion in order to provide added functionality. The HTC Vive tracks
Future Today Institute estimates that by the end of 2017, your movement, while controller sticks send haptic signals to your
300 million wearable devices will be sold. More than half brain as you work your way through simulated environments. Be-
are dedicated to fitness or biometrics, while others are in- yond videos, there is not much additional opportunity to integrate
tended for gaming, work and medical monitoring. news with HMDs.
As of now, nearly all wearables require a smartphone or

71 Smartwatches
computer to see and report data, adjust settings and ar-
chive information. Those coming to market in 2017 and There are a variety of smartwatches and smart wristbands that
2018 will continue to service our fitness and lifestyle needs act as second screens for your mobile phone. With the debut
with our mobile phones as a hub. of the Apple Watch and Samsung Gear watches, advertisers,
marketers, journalists and everyone else who’s even tangentially
In the next 12 months, the wearables market offers limited connected to the content business is now motivated to capture
opportunity for news organizations. However, as the market wrist real estate, building apps and products that combine
matures and more sophisticated devices enter the main- location, news or deals with notifications. The future of smart
stream, there will be opportunities for news integration. watches is certainly promising, however they primarily serve as a
second notification screen for news organizations.
Still, for news organizations, there are several trends to
consider in this space.

TRENDS 70 - 73
Wearables cont.
72 Earables
In-ear computers, otherwise known as earables, will be here
soon. Future versions of Apple’s EarPods will monitor tempera-
ture, perspiration and heart rate during exercise or sports—and News organizations should begin
those earbuds will be used to control electronic devices (like our
phones) using head gestures. The Bragi Dash earbuds double as
experimenting with news applications
a personal assistant, responding to gesture as well as voice. For built for earable interfaces.
example, an incoming phone call can be accepted by shaking
your head yes, or declined by shaking your head no. News or-
ganizations should begin experimenting with news applications
built for earable interfaces.
73 Thinkables
Thinkables will soon allow more adventurous gamers to control
games using only their thoughts. The Neuralink is a brain-machine
interface company founded by Elon Musk, and while it hasn’t built
any products yet, in the fall of 2017 it was actively hiring engi-
neers and designers. Boston-based startup Neurable created a
brain-controlled VR game. It isn’t a gaming company—rather,
it’s researching how to build next-generation thinkable interfac-
es. The 4D Force platform detects brain waves, capturing EEG/
EOG/ EMG signals and converting them into signals a computer
can understand.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 74
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
Internet of X Later
Watch
The SCiO scanner from Consumer Physics allows
consumers to search physical objects using a digital
interface.

With so many objects, networks and people coming online, It’s not unrealistic to say that in the near future, everything
you will start to hear companies calling themselves the “In- you see (and even the things you can’t) will become search-
ternet of X.” able via a distributed network. Journalists will therefore
have troves of new sources to investigate. This will unlock
Examples layers of information previously unavailable to us—but it
Israeli startup Consumer Physics—a sort of Internet of will also create a significant demand for verification.
Ingestibles—wants to put molecular spectroscopy into
smartphones so that you can extract information out of Watchlist
your food and pills. This would enable you to scan a piece Global Alliance for Genomics and Health; Alphabet; Per-
of chicken in order to search the fat and calories on your sonal Genomics Project; University of Southern California
plate. Their research is also able to image prescription and
over-the-counter drugs in order to spot counterfeits. Mean-
time, a new project called MatchMaker Exchange is an “In-
ternet of DNA,” matching the DNA from sick people around
the world.


Informs Act
Strategy Now
TREND 75
Keep
Revisit
Vigilant
5G Later
Watch
5G trials are already underway worldwide.
Credit: Shutterstock

5G trials, supported by the Federal Communications Com- Hardware manufacturers like Qualcomm are readying 5G
mission and the European Union, are underway around the modems and advanced chipsets. For 5G to work, inter-
world. net service providers will need to upgrade their networks.
Globally, there will be a new wave of spectrum auctions
Examples (and arguments). In the U.S., Verizon and AT&T have al-
5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology. We had ready begun piloting 5G. We expect it to take until 2022
1G in the early 1990s and 2G in the late 90s, which enabled to see widespread access in the U.S. The emergence of 5G
us to send text messages between two mobile devices. 3G should be followed closely by every media organization
supported our ability to browse the internet. Now, with 4G, that currently distributes video or has plans to invest in vid-
we’re able to download and upload large videos. There are eo content during the next few years.
competing standards—WiMax and LTE. 5G will dramatically
increase the speeds at which we connect—we’ll be able to Watchlist
pull Ultra HD and 3D video and use VR in the cloud, since Federal Communications Commission; European Union;
download speeds will hover around 10 gigabits per second, Qualcomm; Intel; ISPs.
which will be a boon for news organizations that distribute
video content. But it isn’t just our phones that will use the
connection: driverless cars, smart cities, and smart grids
will all rely on 5G.

About The Future Today Institute
Founded in 2006, the Future Today Institute helps leaders and
their organizations prepare for complex futures. We focus ex-
clusively on how emerging technology and science will dis-
rupt business, transform the workforce and ignite geopolitical
change. Our pioneering, data-driven forecasting methodology
and tools empower leaders to make better decisions about the
future, today.
Our forecasting methodology has been featured in the MIT

Sloan Management Review and in the Harvard Business Review,
and it is taught at universities around the world. FTI clients and
partners include news and entertainment media organizations,
government agencies, Fortune 100 companies, investment firms
and associations. Our focus is technology, and we intentionally
work with a wide variety of organizations to enable the transfer
of knowledge and best practices across industries.
Reliable strategic foresight depends on both ingenuity and rig-

orous evaluation. Our work is always done in teams comprised
of trained futurists as well as subject-area experts, technolo-
gists, designers, process-thinkers and creative minds. FTI is
based in New York City and Washington, D.C.

About The Author
Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist. She is a professor of strate-
gic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and the CEO
of the Future Today Institute. Webb was named to the Think-
ers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to
shape the future of how organizations are managed and led and
was shortlisted for a 2017 Thinkers50 RADAR Award.
Thanks...
To Emily Caufield for her design and production work and to
Cheryl Cooney for editing. Thanks to Kara Lipsky, Ryo Hashimoto
and Ryan Schwartz who assisted with research.

Disclaimer
The 2018 Tech Trends For Journalism Report relies on data,
analysis and modeling from a number of sources, which includes:
sources within public and private companies, securities filings,
patents, academic research, government agencies, market
research firms, conference presentations and papers and
news media stories. This report stems from the Future Today
Institute’s annual Trends report, which is now in its 11th year of
publication. Both the Trends report and this Tech Trends For
Journalism Report are occasionally updated on the FTI website.
FTI has advised, partnered with, and spoken at hundreds of

companies and organizations, some of which are referenced in
this report and are highlighted with an asterisk in the appendix.
FTI does not own any equity position in any of the entities listed
in this presentation.
Any trademarks or service marks used in this report are the

marks of their respective owners and who do not endorse the
statements in this report. All rights in marks are reserved by
their respective owners. We disclaim any and all warranties,
express or implied, with respect to this report.

The Signals Are Talking
Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream
Amy Webb
Publication date: December 6, 2016
$27.99/34.99 CAN • 336 pages • ISBN 978-1-61039-666-0
We invite you to learn and use the tools of a futurist.
Amy Webb’s new book: THE SIGNALS ARE TALKING: Why

Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream arrives at a fortui-
tous moment, as it gives critical guidance on how to think like a
futurist in order to most accurately answer pressing questions
about the future of emerging technologies, science, our econo-
my, political systems, and civil liberties.
“A rare treasure: a substantive guide written in a narrative

that’s a delight to read.”
—Christopher Graves, Global Chair, Ogilvy Public Relations
• Washington Post Bestseller

• Winner, 2017 Gold Axiom Award
• Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016
• Amazon’s Best Books of 2016

Companies, Organizations, Universities and Government Agencies
Mentioned In Our 2018 Trends Report
3 Gimbals Appsfire BLIP Systems Chatfuel
Acrobatiq AppsFlyer Blis China
AdExtent Arizona State University BlockApps Cluster
Adjust Arria NLG Blockstack CogBooks
Adobe Asahi Shimbun Company Blockstream Cognitive Horizons Network
AdRoll Astro Digital Bloomberg Coinbase
Advance Publications Astrocast Bluedot CoinSpark
Advanced Media AT&T Boeing Comcast NBC Universal*
Aeon Audioburst Bosch Group comScore
Aerial & Maritime Auphonic Branch Coral Project
Airbus D&S Autodesk Broadcasters Cornell University
AlgorithmWatch.org Automated Insights Brown Institute at Cosmos

Columbia University
Alibaba Axel Springer Coursera
Button
Alively Backchannel Cox Media Group
Cadreon
Alphabet* Baidu CPXi
California Polytechnic
Amazon Bertelsmann University Crystal
Android Bing Capella Space Inc. Curio.io
Annenberg School Bitcoin CBS Television Deeplink

of Communication
& Journalism Bitcore Cengage Delft University of Technology
Anonymous Bitter Southerner Cerego Digital Globe
Apple BitTorrent Chartbeat Discovery

Disney General Electric iFlytek LG
Dropbox GeoOptics IFTTT Libsyn
Duke University Gimbal Imax Los Alamos National Lab
E.W. Scripps Global Alliance for Genomics IndoorAtlas Macromedia University of

and Health Applied Sciences
Earthcube Industrial Light and Magic
Google* Magic Leap
EdX Instagram
Google Play Mailchimp
EECS at University of Intel
California-Berkeley Grupo Globo Marketo
Interactive Advertising Bureau
Eloqua Harvard University* (IAB) Mattersight Corporation
ESPN Hearst Corporation* Internet Archive McGraw-Hill
Ethereum Hearst Ventures* Intuit MDA
European Union Hera Systems Investigative Reports & Editors Meredith Corp.
Expect Labs Heroku IrisVR MeWe
Facebook HipChat Jaunt Microsoft*
Factom HP Kaggle MIT*
Federal Communications HTC Kanagawa University MIT’s CSAIL

Commission*
Huawei Kepler Communications MIT’s Media Lab
Flatiron School
Hubert Burda Media Khan Academy MobileDeepLinking.org
Fleet Space
Hubspot Kochava Mobileye
Galvanize
Hulu Lawrence Livermore National Monetas
Gannett* Laboratory
Hyve Morpho
Garage Band Lenovo
IBM* MultiChain

Narrative Science NTT PRA Lab at the University of Shanghai Engineering Center
Cagliari for Microsatellites (China)
NASA Ames Research Center Nvidia
PRI* Shenzhen Aerospace
National Geospatial Oculus Donganghong
Intelligence Agency ProPublica
Omni Layer Signal
National Institute for PRX*
Computer-Assisted Reporting Omniture Simpli.fi
Qualcomm
National Public Radio* OneWeb Sinclair Broadcast Group
Quantcast
National University of Defense OpenAI Sky and Space Global
Technology (China) Radio Stations
Oracle Skype
Nautilus Raycom Media
Orbital Insight Snap
Naval Postgraduate School REDEF Group
Oxford University* SoftBank Capital
Netflix Research Center on
Pacific Standard Information Technologies Sony
Neuroware (CiTIUS)
Pandorabots* SoundCloud
New Inquiry Ryver
Pearson Space and Missile Defense
New York Times* Salesforce Command
Personal Genomics Project
News Corp* Samsung* Space Exploration
Pie
Technologies Corp.
Nextar Broadcasting Group Santa Clara University
Pinterest
Space Systems Loral
Nextdoor Satellogic
Planet
SpaceKnow
NextVR Schneier on Security
Planetary Resources
SpacePharma
Nielsen School of Informatics
Pocket
University of Edinburgh SpeakPipe
NRL Naval Center for Space
Polytechnical University
School of Science and Spire
NSL Comm (China)
Engineering
Spotify

SRI International* Time Warner* University of Dundee Wevr
Stanford University TinyLetter University of Maryland, Philip Xiaomi

Computational Imaging Lab Merrill College of Journalism*
Tokyo Institute of Technology* Yahoo
Stanford Computational University of New South Wales
Journalism Lab Tow Center for Digital Yale Law School
Journalism at Columbia University of Santiago de
Stanford University University Compostela Yammer
Stitcher Transcelestial University of Southern Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings

California
Symantec Trello YouTube*
University of Texas at Austin*
Synopsys Tronc Yozio
University of Zurich, Media
Tamedia Tumblr Zeiss
Change and Innovation
Division Zendesk
Tapstream Tune
United States Air Force* ZeroLight
Targeted networks Twilio
Univision
Technische Universitat Berlin Twitch
Verizon
Tencent Twitter*
Viacom*
Texas Tribune Udacity
Vice
The Aerospace Corporation Udemy
Visible Measures
The Information Unacast
Vox
The Media Trust University of Aberdeen
Wall Street Journal
The Ohio State University University of British Columbia
Washington Post
The Onion University of California-Santa
Barbara WeChat
Tierion
University of Chicago Weibo
Time Inc*

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2018

Emerging digital, social, distribution,

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 02

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 03

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 04

The Future Today Institute’s 1 Make observations and harness

6 Are your scenarios comprehensive

Answers What is the future of X?

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 05

Our 2018 Trend Report reveals strategic opportu-

Explaining why these trends matter.

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 06

How To Use Our Report 0

Each trend offers six important pieces

02 Examples 05 Years on the List

What this trend means for you and your news

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 07

05 How are companies/ agencies/ organizations in

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 08

One of the most difficult challenges Learning Stage

Uncertainty About A Technology

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 09

What Is A Trend, Exactly? All trends share a set of conspicuous, universal

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 10

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 11

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 12

Key Insight theory that someday a computer might be capable of cre-

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 13

Artificial Intelligence cont.

AI, Neural Networks and Deep Neural Networks

AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning

Deep learning is a relatively new branch of machine learn-

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Artificial Intelligence cont.

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Artificial Intelligence cont.

Once we are speaking to our machines about the news,

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Longer-Term Impact on the News Industry

Immediate Impact on the News Industry

Low Degree of Certainty

01 Real-Time Machine Learning 03 Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

02 Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC)

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Artificial Intelligence cont.

05 Generative Algorithms For Voice, 06 Image Completion

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Artificial Intelligence cont.

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Longer-Term Impact on the News Industry

Immediate Impact on the News Industry

Key Insight What’s Next

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Longer-Term Impact on the News Industry

Immediate Impact on the News Industry

Key Insight What’s Next

© 2017-2018 Future Today Institute 21

Longer-Term Impact on the News Industry

Immediate Impact on the News Industry

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Longer-Term Impact on the News Industry

Immediate Impact on the News Industry

Key Insight What’s Next