While these predictions suggest that the journalistic community’s enthusiasm for social media platforms has waned over time, there has been no such change in the perceptions of the people actually using these platforms — the audience.

The disadvantages of social media platforms for news publishers and audiences have grown overwhelmingly obvious.

These platforms have grown rife with misinformation and vitriol that threaten to diminish public trust in journalism and encourage animosity toward journalists. Unsurprisingly, many within journalism increasingly see these platforms less as opportunities for audience building and engagement and more as challenges to journalism’s economic stability and its credibility among the public.

As social media’s risks and challenges to journalists intensify (e.g., the abuse and bad faith attacks) while the benefits seemingly diminish (e.g., X and Facebook don’t send big audiences to news anymore while TikTok never has), many within journalism are doubling down on ways to circumvent these platforms rather than simply making do with them. Over the past few years, for example, we’ve seen more and more news organizations invest in newsletters to boost online traffic as well as other efforts to cultivate more direct connections with potential audiences.

These circumstances, where journalists are both souring on social media platforms while still searching for ways to build meaningful relationships with the people who increasingly rely on them for news — raise an interesting question: How have social media platforms’ changing circumstances affected journalists’ perceptions not only of social media platforms, but also of the public? After all, scholars have observed journalists’ tendency to conflate social media posts as representative of public opinion. If journalists assume people on these platforms are acting as representative for the public writ large, then their attitudes toward the platforms themselves might be linked not only with their attitudes toward the people using them, but with the public as a whole.

We attempted to answer this question by examining 11 years of Nieman Journalism Lab’s annual predictions published to understand how the authors of these predictions — a mix of journalism publishers, editors, funders, services providers, and scholars — have changed when it comes to their views on social media platforms and news audiences. Our findings, which were recently published in the academic journal Digital Journalism, revealed that even as this small subset of the journalistic community has grown increasingly critical of social media platforms, they’ve maintained their faith in news audiences themselves. [Ed. note: It’s almost predictions season again — watch out for our 2026 predictions next month.]

The promise of social media for journalism

At first, the authors of these Nieman Journalism Lab predictions placed a great deal of faith in social media platforms to aid journalists in their mission to monetize and engage with audiences.

For example, a 2012 prediction describes their early optimism for YouTube and Twitter, writing, “What is needed are newsrooms that can filter, verify, curate, and amplify social media for their audiences.”

A prediction published in 2015 similarly suggested that 2016 would be the year “we begin to treat every platform like a publishing platform, with its unique audience, its own publishing schedule and formats, and its unique metrics of success.”

And a prediction for 2017 suggested that news organizations would use social media platforms to identify user generated content as “trending” stories that journalists should subsequently cover. “Journalists will not only will take this new way of newsgathering seriously,” this prediction read, “but create strategies and even teams to involve UGC in their process more than ever before.”

These initial predictions shared a sense of optimism about social media platforms, as well as an implicit — often enthusiastic — acceptance that these platforms would play an integral role in the relationship between journalism and the public in a digital era.

Early promise gives way to later concerns

While these early predictions tended to take as a given that social media platforms were here to stay, focusing on ways that journalists might consider using these platforms to improve the quality and impact of their work, over time that assumption started to become more of an open question. Indeed, some of the predictions for 2023, rather than begin with the implicit acceptance that journalists must depend on social media platforms to build and maintain their audiences, explicitly suggested that journalists might consider moving beyond social media platforms altogether.

This is unsurprising considering these followed the Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter the prior year. His ownership of Twitter (now X) has been marked by the platform’s well-publicized embrace of extremist, right-wing figures, and a diminishment of its user experience.

In light of these drastic changes to a platform journalists had until then widely embraced, predictions for 2023 were the first to describe how journalists might consider “jumping ship” from social media platforms. A prediction for 2024 posited that “the news industry will have to confront the realities of building an audience in a post-social media world.”

While these predictions suggest that the journalistic community’s enthusiasm for social media platforms has waned over time, there has been no such change in the perceptions of the people actually using these platforms — the audience.

Audiences still perceived as valuable and good

These same Nieman Journalism Lab predictions reflect much more consistency when it comes to the perceptions of the public.

Our analysis reveals an interesting consistency over time when it comes to the community’s implicit and explicit thoughts and perceptions about the people they hope to reach. Despite the journalistic community’s concerns about digital platforms, they continue to overwhelmingly believe in the value and promise of digital audiences. Predictions viewed audiences as valuable and good.

A prediction from 2012, for example, criticized journalists for “sneering” at the needs of the audience, and instead encouraged journalists to “put [themselves] in the shoes of the audience.” This call did not sound all that different from a similar call included in a prediction published more than a decade later: “Your audience ‘why’ and your newsroom ‘why’ have to be the same.”

Taken together, our analysis reveals that the excitement and enthusiasm this subset of the journalistic community shared at the advent of the social media era has begun to curdle into uncertainty if not outright skepticism about social media platforms. Yet despite the fact that this growing disdain for these platforms stems in no small part from the harassment inflicted upon them within these platforms by the audiences they use these platforms to reach, the journalistic community’s perceptions of these audiences remain positive.

In short, as journalists find themselves increasingly facing “dark participation” in the form of online harassment and abuse on social media platforms, these predictions suggest that regard for the public remains undiminished. The perception of the public as a valuable part of news production has remained constant even as the journalistic community’s perception of social media platforms as a central means of improving the public’s role in news production has grown much darker.

These findings suggest that journalists’ faith in the people they seek to reach with their news is profoundly powerful, which makes sense considering that those who go into journalism aspire to serve the public good. In light of these findings, it is reasonable to assume that, should journalists eventually abandon social media platforms, they will not also abandon their desire to maintain strong, engaged relationships with the people they seek to reach.

Jacob L. Nelson is an associate professor at the University of Utah and the author of Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford University Press, 2021). He researches the relationship between journalism and the public. Gregory P. Perreault scholar of adaptation in journalism. He currently serves as associate editor for Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and associate professor of media literacy & analytics at the Zimmerman School for Advertising & Mass Communications at the University of Florida.

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