Aspirational Metajournalism: What Nieman Journalism Lab Predictions Reveal About Platform and Audience Imaginaries

The past few years of journalism studies scholarship have revealed that journalists and journalism stakeholders are increasingly ambivalent about social media platforms, which have grown rife with misinformation and vitriol that threaten to diminish audience trust in journalism and encourage animosity toward journalists. As social media’s risks and challenges intensify while the benefits diminish, some within journalism are entering a period in which they are no longer begrudgingly depending on these platforms and instead are conceptualizing the best means for circumventing them to build and maintain news audiences. This article seeks to examine the following question: How have these changing circumstances affected journalistic perceptions of social media platforms and news audiences? Drawing on a metajournalistic analysis of over 11 years of annual predictions published by the US journalism trade press Nieman Journalism Lab (n = 154), this study identifies the ways that impressions of social media platforms and news audiences have changed in order to understand what those changes reveal about the relationship between journalists and their audience. We find that although faith in social media platforms has faltered within the journalistic community, faith in the public remains unwavering.