This isn't as much as a prediction for 2026 as it is my hope: that the media will not be so entranced by President Trump's compulsion to dominate every news cycle and instead focus limited resources on stories that matter, stories that hold the powerful accountable, and stories that help people make the best decisions about their lives. In our determination to keep up with Trump, many news organizations, including my own, have out of necessity focused on the pandemonium in government and society.
For decades, philanthropy has reinforced a media landscape that favors the biggest (and whitest) news organizations, whether they be nonprofit, for-profit, or startups, while chronically underinvesting in ethnic and community media. I predict that 2026 will see one or more failures of newsrooms conceived of or propped up by funders, forcing a reckoning about how we support journalism in America.
This year, as legacy news outlets slashed diversity teams, eliminated community beats, and gutted cultural coverage, they undermined the very asset that determines relevance in today's fragmented media environment: cultural fluency. These cuts were framed as cost-saving measures, but in reality, they stripped away the expertise that allows media institutions to build trust, resonance, and meaningful connection with the audiences they claim to serve.
Public media outlets entered 2025 on a wave of unease between declining on-air audience, waning underwriting revenue, post-election news fatigue, and the looming uncertainty about federal funding. The latter sadly became a reality on July 18 when Congress voted to claw back $1.1 billion in public media funding, leaving NPR, PBS, and more than 400 member stations across the country to figure out what to do next.
In the post‑pandemic news cycle, it became easy to treat charts as a kind of journalistic spell: visualize the data and legitimacy will follow. But the flood of partisan "stat dumps" has trained plenty of people to see numbers as just another weapon in a never-ending culture war. In 2026, the task for data journalism is not to make more extravagant visualizations, but to rebuild data as a shared language between people who no longer trust one another.
Over the last few years, publishers have watched their major distribution partners, first social and now search, become volatile and unreliable. Constant shifts have weakened the relationship between publishers and the platforms that once delivered their audiences. The AI era is pushing this to a breaking point. As generative interfaces replace traditional search, it has become clear that publishers cannot depend on discovery happening elsewhere. The only durable asset left is the audience's recognition of and loyalty to each publisher's brand.
Weiss had recently arrived in Los Angeles from New York, a city she'd left behind in 2020 along with her job editing and writing for the New York Times' "Opinion" section. Although Weiss technically left of her own volition - blasting the paper for its "illiberal environment" in her publicly posted resignation letter - it felt as though she had been hounded out in the wake of the Tom Cotton op-ed fiasco, during which her boss, James Bennet, had been forced to step down amid a newsroom revolt.
Once I cooled off, I realized that counsel, which arrived in a LION sustainability audit, was wise if difficult to achieve. Try finding a grant for a business partner. Go ahead, I'll wait. Not getting "operational" money is, of course, a complaint not limited to news organizations, nonprofit or otherwise. Program officers are generally disinclined to pay for your overhead. But let me propose something radical: If we're saving journalism, it's going to require overhead.
It's an efficient way to get information, and it lives in a space that combines many information sources. Social feeds are places where audiences can get updates about the many facets of their life - community events, road closures, upcoming local issues, updates from friends and family, advice for working more efficiently - in one place, making it especially ripe to soak in new information.
Our starting point: Let's agree that journalism is not content. It's not a product. It's not an export. It's a shared resource. Treat it that way and everything changes. The idea of a journalism commons is not new (certainly not to Nieman Lab predictions), nor is it a metaphor; it's a tried-and-trusted, locally owned governance model that anyone can take part in,
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The old model imagined journalism as a set of headlights that froze wrongdoing in the glare of publicity. But today, the information environment is constantly illuminated with infinite content. When everything is bright, nothing stops. Nothing changes. The spotlight has become ambient light. For years, journalism relied on a simple chain of accountability: expose wrongdoing and someone would apply pressure. Public institutions, regulators, voters, shareholders, civic groups, or even social norms were expected to take the next step once the facts were visible.
Forty years of toxic media policy, the libertarian ethos of big tech, the collapse of the 20th-century business model, the paranoia and extremism of online life, the rise of the far right: when stirred together, these nutrients do not constitute the soil for a healthy free press. This is certainly not the first time people have found themselves with a dearth of formal news structures. Besides most of human history, one could point to present-day Hungary or Turkey or Saudi Arabia.
But in 2026, we're going to stop personalizing the menu and start personalizing the meal. The first phase will be the "easy" stuff, mostly personalization of format. If you're a commuter, you get the audio summary that lasts the exact length of your train ride. If you tend to spend the working day in your inbox, you get the newsletter bullet points. If you're a devoted flicker, you get the vertical video.
It's a cold Tuesday in early November, and Sarandos, 61, has arrived at the launch party for Netflix's new business in a small town just outside Philadelphia called King of Prussia, home to a massive shopping mall of the same name. There, the media group has opened its latest venture: a themed entertainment center featuring a restaurant, store, game rooms, an escape room, and other attractions inspired by characters from its most popular series such as Squid Game, K-Pop Demon Hunters, One Piece, and Wednesday.
