We’ll rethink scale, trust, and our life’s work

Anyone with a sunny outlook for 2025 is delusional.

Journalism faces an existential crisis, and whether we can meet the moment collectively will be telling. Here are four areas I predict we will be hearing a lot about in 2025, all interconnected.

Trust

I spent 30 years in mainstream media, including some big jobs at places like the L.A. Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. At all of them, we twisted ourselves into knots asking why audiences didn’t trust us. It took me much less time through my work at Epicenter, a local news site launched in Queens during the pandemic, to answer. First, I had to flip the question into the affirmative: How do you gain trust with communities? What I discovered is something social workers and brand marketers alike already know. You help people once and they’ll call you again — and again. That action, of turning to you, seeking you out, represents trust.

And so in the days after helping someone secure, say, a covid vaccine appointment, we found ourselves inundated with requests, non-health-related. Can you help me find an English tutor? Where can I find a one-bedroom for under $2,000 in Brooklyn? This pattern repeated itself after the U.S. presidential election. A sample of the questions we are receiving right now:

• Should I renew my passport?
• I run a small business. How liquid do I need to be?
• My child is 23 and on my health plan. What if the Affordable Care Act is overturned?
• We applied for Section 8 housing in NYC, opened up for the first time in 15 years. What happens if vouchers are abandoned?

We may not have all the answers, but we vow to keep being there for our communities, who seem all too willing to guide our news agenda, if only we keep listening and serving and helping.

It’s no longer enough to meet people where they are. Building trust relies on us actually doing something.

The robots

Media across sizes and regions feel wildly divided on the role of generative AI in their newsrooms. On the one hand, The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI alleging copyright infringement. For many local outlets who arrive to news stories months, even years before mainstream media, we know this frustration well: seeing something built on our backs, often not credited, rising to virality and prominence and, perhaps, profit.

Meanwhile, smaller publishers have been quick to weave AI into their processes, and leave the impossible fights to the big guys. Most of us don’t have the luxury of creating committees to “study” AI, yet we can’t afford to be left behind. Some of the greatest innovations I see in AI tools come from outlets such as The Jersey Bee, which is mining websites, event listings, Facebook groups, and other online mentions to generate dozens of micro-newsletters every week. At Epicenter, we recently turned to another AI tool, GovWire, to cover an evening community meeting and emerged with a report that is part-human, part-AI and emblematic of what’s possible. We saved about a day’s work thanks to the tool.

There are rightful ethical questions over the role of AI in our newsrooms, from transparency and disclosures of who wrote/produced/created what to the displacement of workers already on shaky ground. But righteousness feels a dangerous, privileged perch as the robots march on and ahead.

Only by locking arms can we take control, achieve efficiencies, revolutionize roles, and guide the technology toward serving the greater good.

Revenue

There is a single crisis in journalism, and from it all other problems emanate: money.

In 2025, journalists will have to get more comfortable not just understanding and explaining how their employers make money but being a part of the solution. We can no longer be media companies bragging about the Chinese wall and organized into opposing sides, meaning one side makes money and another spends it. Editorial operations will need to jump headfirst into revenue opportunities such as deeply reported, paywalled content and reports; or data-driven insights around audience and consumption; or events and opportunities for audiences to connect to talent and newsmakers.

These trends have been underfoot for some time now. The best example is likely The New York Times’ subscription growth. About a decade ago, a staffer explained to me why the paper was so focused on a subscription strategy: not just to generate revenue, but to unite multiple departments around a common cause.

Today, media organizations, and all the person they employ, need to rally around revenue. I am worried about the number of journalists I meet who have no idea how advertising works, let alone the world of digital media advertising (run, do not walk, to learn terms like CPMs, programmatic, and GAM).

I speak as one of the ignorant. Five years ago, when I left mainstream media to launch my own companies, I thought I had had enough exposure to the business “side.” But it’s taken me landing deals, making payroll and growing customers to internalize these lessons and apply them.

When people ask me if the revenue hires of our future really need to understand ad sales, audience growth, philanthropic funding, product innovation, and diversified business models, I say yes to all of the above. Plus, they need to lead with compassion and charisma. I do so not knowing if training workforces adept in such rapidly changing skills is even possible. But they are who we need to helm our newsrooms.

Talent

On that note, I speak to unemployed journalists virtually every day looking for work — and also to hiring managers who have scant few jobs but tell me they can’t find the right people despite the hordes applying. This mismatch underscores the talent crisis in our industry.

Right now, it is very, very hard for me to talk to someone who wants to be a journalist and assure them there is a viable path ahead. I decided to embrace the calling at the age of 12 when my family moved from Puerto Rico to New Jersey. I joined the school newspaper and found myself interviewing the principal in my first week. Now I’m 48. I find myself reinventing my relationship with our profession and reassessing my skills at least every six months, often more frequently. Once upon a time, that was more likely an every three- to four-year exercise. I do not know if humans can face such uncertainty and emerge unjaded or unscathed.

So I take those desperate phone calls — two or three a day. Do everything you can, I advise. Use Gemini. Learn Mailchimp and ConvertKit and Beehiiv. Study aggressive audience acquisition tactics. And please, please, don’t forget to report and write. Stay curious. Get comfortable with smaller audiences and hope they might care and connect to what you have to say. I’m rooting for you.