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Technorevolution

Reporters, say goodbye to journalism: you are obsolete

by Saleem Khan

"Newspapers will be here for us 20 years from now just as they have been ever since the first daily was created in Germany in 1609," the National Post publisher and president told the Calgary Chamber of Commerce in a speech last November.

"Newspapers will always be newspapers. Our enduring strength... is that our medium is paper itself," he said, citing format and convenience as the key reasons why newspapers will always compete strongly with radio, TV and the Internet.

Babick has a motivated self-interest in saying so since he's charged with making Conrad Black's $150 million year-old newspaper a success, but that aside, how valid is his claim? The short answer is "not very."

Emerging technologies, foremost the Internet ('the Net'), stand to fundamentally alter journalism in all forms.

"The Net is not merely another transmission medium like radio and TV," says Mindy McAdams, the University of Florida's Knight chair in journalism technologies. "The Net marks a change in human communication capabilities on a par with the invention of the phonetic alphabet and moveable type."

It's all about you

Already, the seeds of journalism's future are sprouting. Today you can customise news Web sites, software, tickers for your computer, and direct e-mail services, but they are only a hint of what is to come.

In 1993, MIT's News in the Future (NIF) lab began ongoing testing of Fishwrap, a Web-based, individualized newspaper for faculty and students. Its software culls articles reflecting a user's geographical and subject interests from diverse electronic sources and assembles them into an online newspaper rather than a search engine-style list of links. So, a student normally unable to follow his tiny community's events from a big city thousands of miles away can stay current on his hometown, campus life and the world.

The project is so successful that San Francisco's two major newspapers (the Chronicle and the Examiner) and a TV station use the software for SFGate, a news site that brings Fishwrap's abilities to their audience.

We will see more alliances of this kind as technology-empowered individuals bypass older media attempting to avoid extinction.

"Online journalism is only in its infancy, but already it shows signs of blurring the distinction between news and rumor," says Lance Strate, chair of Fordham University's department of communications and media studies in New York. "The gatekeeping function of editors and publishers are bypassed on the Internet and the Web."

Two things result from this. First, branding the news -- building a reliable reputation and consumer trust in a particular news outlet, like CNN, the CBC, The Globe and Mail or the New York Times -- will be crucial as 'news' organizations proliferate; and second, there will be growing demand for well-trained journalists who adhere to professional standards.

Nothing but Net

However, Babick is right when he says the Internet won't kill traditional news media. That honor is reserved for 'NetX' -- what the Internet will become. And the future is at hand. Literally.

By 2002, a billion Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) devices will be in use around the world, many a hybrid of cellular phones, electronic organizers, and Internet appliances. They will let you talk, plan your day, surf the Web, read your news and receive constant updates, conduct secure e-commerce transactions and much more, anywhere, anytime, all in one tiny handheld unit. The first wave of WAP phones are available today.

These devices will eventually disappear as increasingly miniaturized optical, biological and electronic computers are integrated into our clothing, glasses, contact lenses, or even our bodies. True three-dimensional displays that require no special glasses could let you experience (not just watch) a news event live, via telepresence. Electronic paper that looks, feels and costs the same as newsprint but has a computer's multimedia and dynamic search and sorting capabilities will make modern media look like cave paintings. The first prototypes of all of these technologies exist today, and they will kill the traditional newspaper as soon as 2020.

The End of Journalism

The endpoint of all of this is the death of modern journalism.

Artificially intelligent personal agents like Fishwrap on steroids will autonomously learn your news interests and seek them out on NetX, constantly rewriting their programs to execute your wishes more efficiently, just as humans change our own 'programs' through the daily experience of living.

These agents will also independently research and produce tailored articles and multimedia news spots -- prototype software can already find articles on the Web and summarize them into news briefs, and experts predict computers rivalling the human brain's capabilities could exist as soon as 2020.

"As people rely more and more on virtual agents to find their information, this even alters some of the fundamental premises of journalism," says Blake Harris, director of the futurist consultancy Future Visons, and editor-at-large of Government Technology magazine. "The tradition was that journalism employed 'correspondents,' people who go where we can't be to send back information about what is happening...[and] journalists and editors have assumed the job of figuring out what was 'news'."

However, technology's ability to open journalists' information sources will delegate those roles to the news consumer, Harris predicts, changing the journalist's job "from finding the news to report to an increasing role of adding depth and perspective to the events that are occurring." Continues Harris, "In the future, that will become much more the primary logic of the profession."

Regardless of the future journalist's job description, Emmy award winning journalism trainer Tim Knight says journalists have a choice today in shaping the future of their craft.

"Journalism is going one of two ways. One way is to keep selling itself as a commodity and ultimately a propaganda machine owned, operated and exploited by the powerful. The other is for journalism to rethink and re-evaluate and eventually emerge renewed and reborn as truly a servant of the people."

Saleem Khan is a journalist who covers technology and international affairs. A version of this column appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of MEDIA magazine.