News Year Predictions for 2024

Part of our mission here at the News Literacy Initiative is to make citizens more aware of how news conventions and storytelling norms shape the information that reaches us. Each January, news consumers are overwhelmed with stories predicting what the New Year will bring. While news is usually at its worst when predicting the future, New Year’s predictions do give us a chance to look back at auld lang syne and think about what the road ahead may bring.

Truth be told, many of the “what to expect in 2024” stories are superficial puff pieces, marketing the next fashion or showbiz trend. The New York Times’ style desk, for example, predicted “jocks will be cool again” (because of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce), rosettes will grace the runways, Gen Xers will abandon social media to be interesting in real life and Gen Alpha will start mocking Gen Z. Doing a search for predictions for 2024 yields an abundance of stories like this.

Some of the news predictions are gloomier. Teasing its upcoming programming, , CNN warned that the war in Gaza could escalate, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine could draw out to a deadly stalemate, and an A.I.-fueled political campaign featuring an indicted candidate who thrives on misinformation could be seismic.

NPR predicted the media landscape would change in 2024. The number of streaming services will contract, a good guess given media ownership concentration trends and the unsustainable number of new series produced over the last couple of years. Expect your rates to climb and don’t be surprised if formerly ad-free services like Amazon Prime, now that customers are hooked, start charging more to keep it that way. They also predict that the news media, driven by defamation suits against Fox News for its role in spreading Trump’s post-election lies, will get better at fighting misinformation. Finally, they hope a growing awareness that “horse race”-style coverage is failing democracy will open space for a more deliberative style of reporting, what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls focusing on “not the odds but the stakes.”

If you want to read about other things to expect from news media in 2024, we’ve got a good suggestion. Every year, the Nieman Lab – a non-profit at Harvard that helps journalists navigate the internet age - invites dozens of experts to look into the crystal ball. It’s worth checking out in full, but here are some highlights.

Bill Adair, founder of Politifact wrote that there are huge “fact deserts” in America where the odds of a politician having their statements checked are roughly 0.1%, which, in turn, makes it easy to lie with impunity. He predicts that fact-checkers will change their approach to help fix that problem, even working in tandem with social media companies to help curb the flow of misinformation on their platforms.

Dannagal Young, from the University of Delaware, sees little reason for optimism about the flow of misinformation, arguing that for-profit TV news – because of its focus on performance over substance, personalities over issues and conflict over harmony – will exploit populist authoritarian candidates who bluster, threaten, and lie to draw better ratings. Alas, she doesn’t see signs that TV will start prioritizing the public interest as we enter this important election year.

Ben Collins, a reporter at NBC, sees things differently, predicting 2024 will be the year when cable news would finally give up on “kayfabe” – the word that describes how those involved in professional wrestling pretend the spectacle is real to keep the entertaining illusion alive. For years now, TV journalists have hyped their infotainment shows, pretending that the tired, audience-tested performances of the pundits and politicians on the shows were completely earnest to preserve the illusion of reality for the fans at home who tune in night after night. Something has changed, he thinks. “News consumers have developed positive relationships with people who know and understand that this is a game, and who actively talk about how they operate within it.” Collins predicts that this is the year that cable news kayfabe will finally die.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Victor Pickard predicts this will be the year that the public will finally come to terms with political economy, moving beyond shaming news organizations for the predictable failures that flow from their imperative to generate returns for shareholders. He sees us collectively grappling with the need to create new models to fund the production of public interest journalism. “We can fight to ensure that our media embody the principles of participatory democracy and are dedicated to serving social needs, not private profits. We must replace the always-already failing commercial media system to rescue journalism from the death spiral of capitalist logics. Ultimately, the market won’t save journalism. If we take political economy seriously, we’d know that in our bones.”

And finally, in the year following the unleashing of generative language A.I., several experts hoped that news organizations would finally stop hyping the products – which are notoriously unreliable and unsustainably expensive to run - and explain the reality more clearly. Gordon Crovitz, founder of the company NewsGuard (which leverages A.I. search tools to fight the spread of misinformation), said that the problem with A.I. models is that they are trained on the information pollution that chokes the internet. As a result, ChatGPT and Google’s Bard spread the misinformation they are trained on between 80-98% of the time. They found 566 websites masquerading as trustworthy news sites that pumped out A.I.-generated fake news. Crovitz thinks that the companies who run these machines will have to fix them, or they will go out of business. If they trained the machines on NewsGuard’s data about misinformation, for example, they could suppress fake news and only be wrong 20% of the time. Otherwise, it’s garbage in and garbage out, which would spell lights out for the A.I. as a viable business model.

Richard Tofel, former president of ProPublica, predicts that 2024 will be a challenging year for A.I. entrepreneurs who wanted to use other people’s work to make their machines useful for people and profitable for the companies.. Right now, publishers are trying to prevent generative language A.I. companies from training their machines on their content without consent or compensation. The outcomes of the coming legal fight over copyright and fair use will determine the future of generative A.I. If A.I. can just instantly ingest the news every day without compensating the news organizations who produced it, it will be another nail in the coffin of the news industry. If, however, A.I. companies are forced to compensate the news organizations that produce the real information that A.I. models learn from, it could help both industries be more viable.

Cindy Royal, who directs the Media Innovation Lab at Texas State, suggested that while the utopic future that the A.I. tech bubble marketers are hawking – where the news consumer will just chat with an all-knowing bot every time something comes up – is unlikely anytime soon given all the glitches, the future will look a lot like the present. “There will be ethical, social, and legal implications. There will be mishaps and confusion. Same as it ever was.” En garde!

We here at the News Literacy Initiative, knowing that our democracy still depends on quality information to help us solve our shared problems, think the coming year will again demand much of us. We will still need to be vigilant, critical, and active citizens. We will still need to fine-tune our senses and sensibilities so that we can tell the difference between news that serves the public interest and noise that tears at the social fabric. My resolution for the New Year is that I will do my best to slow down and react less to the noise makers who will try to dominate the news cycle this election year. The loudest are usually over-compensating for having nothing to say, so I for one am going to stay away from the media platforms that profit from their presence and try not to amplify them. Happy New Year!