Future of Journalism
San Francisco State University
23 April 1994

Reports from the cutting edge

I’ve been asked to set the stage a bit and talk about some of the emerging technologies and related issues that will affect you as journalists and as citizens of the world. In my usual fashion, I will ask more questions than I answer. The world is changing so fast, that anyone who tells you they know what’s going to happen is either lying or trying to sell you something.

The first thing and most important fact, if you haven’t already figured it out, is that the means of production are in the hands of the people. This single issue will affect you more in the near-term than any fancy technology coming down the pike five years from now.

Fax machines, modems, word processors, laser printers, still and video cameras (and even CD-ROM creation stations, though on a different level) are becoming inexpensive enough for ordinary people to own and use them.

And when it comes to news. that means everybody’s a reporter. It’s become axiomatic to use Rodney King’s camera-toting neighbor and the fax machines at Tianamen Square as examples of this trend, but they only scratch the surface.

Desktop publishing equipment means that not only is there more print than ever, but it’s almost all in digital form, ready to be redeployed. The plummeting cost of fax machines and modems means that redeployment is unbelievably simple — and compared to smearing ink on a page, significantly less expensive. Though not as deeply entrenched in digital media as the print world, desktop video editing tools are creating a whole new group of producers that will have access to the vast capacity of tomorrow’s TV network.

That puts network providers such as AT&T, the telcos and the cable companies — the builders of infrastructure — in the distribution business, in the very same way that goods are moved along roads today. Which is obviously where that metaphor of the information superhighway came from, by the way.

AT&T’s notion of the ubiquitous digital network is to make everyone a publisher — just stick a wire into the back of your computer and you’re in the information business.

Thus, because of technology’s relentless push down the cost curve, news has officially become a commodity.

But of course, you already know this, whether instinctively or through your own experience. You can get “news as it happens” during crisis periods on CNN, certainly. Or you can log onto The WELL or America Online, home to alternative news wires, eyewitness reports and modem jocks who just love to sit there and type in everything they hear on radio and TV, or what ever they read in their hometown papers across the country.

The fact that news is a commodity creates a few new problems and opportunities, if you want to be positive about it.

The problem is that there is an incredible amount of noise out there. Get into the “news” area on America Online. Every day, various sources — from the New York Times to Reuters to various tiny wires and industry-specific news services — pour thousands of stories onto the network. You don’t find what you’re looking for by looking for someone’s byline who you trust. You don’t scan an attractively laid-out page and let your eye catch something and draw you in.

You scan headlines, all stacked up on each other, written in all capital letters. You type in a keyword that pulls up all the stories the network’s software thinks might be related to what you want, which it often isn’t. There’ s no way to know, until you actually get into the story, who it’s by or where it came from.

As more and more of your organizations move into electronic publishing, whether you like it or not, you have to try to make your stories heard over the din.

The problem, then, is twofold:

How do you find your way through all the stuff to get to the stories you want to read?

And even more important to you, I’m sure, is how do you attract attention to your organization, your stories — how do you “brand” your information and set it apart from everyone else’s, when everything is on-demand?

There’s a question.

Living on networks poses a few other interesting problems as well. Reporters have to learn to live in a world where their words aren’t fixed on a page for posterity, but float in cyberspace and allow them to engage in discourse with their readers that would otherwise be impossible.

That is a very good thing, and in fact, many of the magazines that have gone “online” are finding tremendous interest on the part of their readers to engage in discussion.

Other than the obvious problem of “I’m already working 15 hours a day, and now you want me to hang around online and listen to people abuse my writing and my reporting? Thanks a lot” … there are some interesting legal issues that reporters should keep in mind.

One is intellectual property in cyberspace.

Time Online recently sponsored a live discussion (typed in) between John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Dorothy Denning, a computer security specialist. They were debating the Clipper chip, which I’ll talk a bit more about later. Barlow had captured the live discussion on his hard disk, thus he had a transcription of the conversation. He cleaned it up and sent it out over the net — and got into a flame war with one of the Time Online staffers who said, essentially, that Barlow didn’t have the right to distribute his own words because it took place in a window on a computer screen that said “Time Magazine.”

A little something about freedom of speech there, I think. But that argument can backfire, too. I spoke last week at the American Society of Magazine Editors’ annual conference and an editor in the audience asked one of the lawyers on the panel about reporters talking to readers online.

It seems one of his reporters had been engaged in an onscreen discussion with a reader and in the course of conversation, started talking a little too close to home about unnamed sources in one of his stories. The lawyer found the situation fascinating. Because once such information has been made public in any forum, whether in print or in a private message in cyberspace, legal protections about protecting sources has been voided.

Privacy

Much of the promise of digital networks is that we will be able to conduct all kinds of commerce over them — home banking; home shopping; selecting, paying for and having delivered our entertainment products; video telephone service; education; and the usual stuff like creating and disseminating information, as we do in our chosen professions today — storing notes, phone numbers, etc.

The same digital technology that allows people vastly improved freedom of expression can also turn into the most widespread surveillance tool in the history of humanity.

When you float information off its physical medium — the page, the video cassette, whatever — then transform it into the binary code of the computer and start sending it around a global network, you make it possible for anyone with sufficient desire and capability to tap that network and translate that information into a form they can use.

Hackers have been doing it on banks and credit card companies and government computers for years now. The NSA and the FBI haven’t been quite so clever, but they’re working on it.

This move into the networked life is also a bonanza for marketers who salivate at the ability to target their advertising pitches for diapers directly at households with infants, for example, or wine ads for those who order a lot of alcohol over their home shopping channel, etc. The information superhighway is presenting them with an unparalleled opportunity to create a growth business.

Civil liberties groups concerned with individual privacy, as well as industries concerned with protecting their intellectual property, are rallying to protect that information. The government would prefer that they didn’t. I suggest you get up to speed on both the Clipper chip and the Digital Telephony legislation quickly. Both of turn global networks into de facto surveillance networks that touch virtually every citizen in America, if not the world.

There are so many technologies and issues that touch the lives of journalists as we enter this new digital era:

- who gets access to information services and who pays for them,
- how do you change the way you work together as journalists, covering this change
- narrowcasting, on-demand programming and the death of mass media,
- how to move away from the scoop mentality into adding value — maybe with technology, maybe not —

but I’ll stop for now because I’m really interested in what the other speakers have to say as well.