Adam Clayton Powell, III

The Journalist in Cyberspace: Technical Requirements for Today and for the Future

A Warsaw Journalism Center International Conference

Palace of Culture Warsaw, Poland

October 11-12, 1997

Co-organized and co-sponsored by

the Goethe Institute, the Polish National Broadcast Council, the German Embassy, and the American Embassy

Thank you, Jane [Dobija], for your invitation, and to all of you for including me in this weekend's conference. Your charge to me this morning is to address the issue of technical requirements for today and in the future. So here is the answer to the question, inside this black velvet case. Upwrap it, open the case, and as you can see, a small hand-held calculator. These are so commonplace and so cheap we do not give them much thought; they are unremarkable. Magazines give them for free if you subscribe. This one was given to me as a party favor at a dinner in Washington.

But this calculator is the same thing as this computer: they both have as their critical functioning part a small computer chip. Yes, my computer is somewhat more complex and more powerful, but it is the same thing.

The only difference between this inexpensive calculator and this expensive computer is time. And that relationship, the formula that links the price of computer power to elapsed time, has been quantified as Moore's Law. The Moore in Moore's Law is Gordon Moore, co-founder of the world largest maker of computer chips, Intel. Moore noticed that computer chips evolved so rapidly that power could double every 18 months.

If you do the arithmetic, you will find that means the price of a given unit of computer power drops by three orders of magnitude every twenty years. In other words, every two decades, the price of computer power drops by a factor of one thousand.

One example from history: ENIAC, the first modern electronic computer, was built in the 1940's for the U.S. Army, and it cost millions of dollars. It did only one thing: artillery trajectories.

In the 1960's, 20 years later, you could buy a computer that performed that same function. But instead of millions of dollars, it cost thousands. Two decades later, the cost had dropped by a factor of one thousand.

Move forward another twenty years, to the 1980's. You could go to your neighborhood Radio Shack and buy a device that performed that same function. But now, two decades after it cost thousands of dollars, the price had dropped to under ten dollars. Twenty years later, one one-thousandth of the price.

Here is another example, from my experience at CBS News: In the 1976 presidential election in the U.S., we wanted real-time animated graphics on television as part of our coverage. In 1976, that required a Cray supercomputer that would have cost millions of dollars. We had to make do with simpler technology.

Last year, twenty years later, CBS and the other American networks did have real-time animated computer graphics as part of their television coverage of our presidential election. But twenty years later, the networks could all afford it, because instead of costing millions of dollars, the animated graphics ran on Silicon Graphics work stations that cost thousands of dollars. Twenty years later, one one-thousandth of the cost.

Let's go forward another two decades. By 2016 that same computer power to do live real-time animated graphics will cost you under ten dollars -- the price of this calculator. Within two decades, we will have the power of a Cray supercomputer in every television set, and the power of a Silicon Graphics scientific work station in babies' toys.

We have no idea what this will mean for society, let alone journalism.

For today, we can see what this means for society and for journalism: convergence.

John Hoagland described how convergence has led to a revolution in filing video journalism from the field, even from Bosnia and Afghanistan. But consider what it means for the receivers in everyone's home and office. Hoagland mentioned Web TV, which lets you use a television to look at the Internet. Now we also have the Real Player, which lets you use a computer to watch television. In its new models, Sony has combined them into a computer which also has a television tuner.

Acceptance of this technology in the U.S. is coming at breathtaking speed.

One way to gauge the diffusion of new media is to measure the number of years from introduction to penetration of half of the consumer households. In the United States, it was 70 years before half of American households had telephones. For color television, it took seventeen years. AM radio took ten years to reach half of the households in America.

Computers are spreading at an even more rapid rate than AM radio did. And the pace of technological innovation will not abate. Consider the events of just the late summer and early fall:

Last month, Intel announced multilevel cell memory. This development by the largest maker of computer chips in the world means in addition to ones and zeroes we now have fractions. That, in turn, will enable Intel to produce computers with much more memory at a much lower price.

The British have announced of photonic amplifiers, reducing the need to covert light in fiber optic cable back into electrical signals. This will enable fiber optics to carry vastly more data at blinding speeds at lower cost.

And last week, one week ago today, at The Freedom Forum headquarters in Arlington, leading scientists, engineers and journalists gathered on the 40th anniversary of the launch of the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik, to discuss coverage of science and technology.

One speaker raised the question of which story was the most important development of 1997. His answer: It was not Mir, or the July 4 landing on Mars, or Bosnia or the fires in Indonesia.

The biggest story of 1997, in his view, was IBM's announcement last month of the ability to deposit copper circuits on silicon chips.

This will change everything: Each chip will contain more circuits, more memory, and more power -- all at lower cost.

We can see new journalism tools on the horizon over the next year or two:

The flat panel news tablet, which combines the depth of a newspaper with the graphics and moving video of television, is finally available in prototype form. [demonstrate] Under development for years at Knight Ridder, the Japanese have developed a working model, and Roger Fidler, who pioneered the flat panel development at Knight Ridder and as a fellow at The Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center, is working on applications at the Liquid Crystal Instutute at Kent State University in Ohio.

Also in development is digital paper. Unlike the rigid flat panel, digital paper is flexible sheets of material that will hold type and graphics. Plug in and download today's newspaper, or a book from the library, then roll it up and carry it onto the bus.

Voice activation is now a reality. United Airlines announced last month that some callers to its reservation lines will be connected not to a human agent but to a voice recognition computer. Airline reservations require a limited vocabulary, but it does mean the computer can distinguish between "Krakow" and "Chicago" -- or, more difficult, between "Dulles" airport in Washington and "Dallas" airport in Texas.

This is all science-fiction. A future without keyboards is straight out of Star Trek, with consequences we can only imagine for spelling and writing skills. Perhaps we will return to the epic poems of a pre-Gutenberg era.

But as we struggle to keep pace with the computer research laboratories, we journalists must be able to use all of the new media tools, not just pencil or pen, and not just camera or microphone. It means we soon must use tools barely imagined today. It means we are all students, constantly learning new tools and new skills.

Newspapers and broadcasters have already embraced computers and the Internet not only for prduction but for distribution. Some newspapers in Poland are on line every day, and you can read almost every major newspaper in the U.S. on the Internet, mostly for free. Only a few charge for on-line subscriptions: The New York Times is free to online subscribers in the United States, but the cyberspace Times charges a hefty fee here in Europe. And The Wall Street Journal charges everywhwere. But for the most part, they are all free.

According to the surveys at last month's N.A.B. [National Association of Broadcasters] radio convention, the annual meeting of U.S. radio stations and networks, you can now hear 700 radio stations live on the Internet. And coming up fast: live television on the Internet.

To satisfy the requirements for advertising, we now have audience ratings for the Internet, so we can measure the number of people on line each day. The most popular Internet news services have very familiar names: CNN, MSNBC, and USA TODAY.

More people in the U.S. go to the leading Internet news services and Internet entertainment programs than to many of the most popular cable television networks.

On any given night, more Americans go on line at one Internet service alone, America Online, than watch CNN or MTV on television.

And the new Internet news services have new names. CNN did not exist 30 years ago. USA TODAY just started fifteen years ago. MSNBC started last year. In the past few months, Netscape and Yahoo, two of the most popular sites on the Internet because of their navigation and search tools, have become known as places where you can also find news and news services, competing with CNN, USA TODAY, and The New York Times.

This means we have many new voices, new entrants, and new sources for news. The major news organizations of the early 21st century may not yet exist.

Consider the experience of two decades ago: At CBS News in the 1970s, we rejoiced in the lower costs of field coverage made possible by the new generation of earth satellites. Instead of spending $3,000 to bring a picture from Los Angeles for the CBS Evening News, with satellite feeds it only cost $300. That meant we at CBS could afford nightly remotes to all parts of the U.S. and to more and more remote corners of the world.

What none of us anticipated was the effect of the lower cost on the barriers to entry into the network news business. The same technological forces that lowered our price for global coverage made it possible for a nearly bankrupt television station, channel 17 in Atlanta, to become a national satellite network in the U.S.

And a few years later, the owner of that near-bankrupt channel 17 did his arithmetic calculations, and he realized it was then technically possible -- and even more important, financially possible -- to start the first 24-hour television news service.

By now you have guessed that the owner of that struggling television station in Atlanta was Ted Turner, and his new idea was CNN.

Now costs are being pushed down yet again. Desktop publishing has given anyone with a PC loaded with Quark and Adobe the ability to design and print publications and has led to a revolution in print media still being felt.

So now desktop video within a few months or years at the most will give anyone with a PC and desktop video software the ability to record and edit video without expensive tape machines and switchers. This will lead to a revolution in broadcast media here in Poland and all over the world.

And the Internet gives anyone with a PC and a telephone line a global printing press and a worldwide broadcast transmitter.

But many of these new sources of news and information may not be news organizations at all but instead may be computer or telephone companies, or corporate public relations offices, or government agencies.

After all, you can hear 700 of the world's radio stations live on the Internet. But you can also hear 7,000 other Internet radio stations, audio sources, live on the Internet.

One of them is The Freedom Forum: since January, we have transmitted our tech conferences from Europe and from the U.S. live on the Internet. We find this exciting, because via Internet, in addition to dozens of people attending in person, we can reach thousands and potentially millions who can listen live on line.

But this is a very different media landscape: the tens of millions of people on the Internet now find it just as easy to listen to the news live from The Freedom Forum or the Warsaw Journalism Center as it is to listen to the news live from a major state broadcaster in Warsaw or Washington. It is just another button on your Internet Real Player.

This summer we saw a glimpse of that future: The leading source of information for last summer's landing on the planet Mars was not CNN or the NY Times. More people around the world went directly to NASA, the U.S. government space agency, and to its information service operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

An all-time record Internet audience went not to a news agency for the news but to the government's news site.

The NASA news site was very well edited and presented, and it received the highest marks from journalists. But it certainly invites the question of whether newspaper readers and television news viewers are accepting government sources as the equal of (and as a valid substitute for) traditional journalism sources, newspapers and broadcasters.

Where all of this goes is unclear. The only constant is change at a seemingly accelerating pace. But rather than be threatened, we may and should instead choose to embrace it, for all of its uncomfortable unfamiliarity.

The British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote of this in his wonderful 1993 play, Arcadia. In it, he presents a character named Valentine, a mathematician trying to persuade his unsympathetic fellow characters of the wonders of modern physics and quantum mechanics, with all of its uncertainty and counterintuitive structures.

But Stoppard has Valentine urging his fellow characters to embrace these changes, as we must embrace change now, even if it is unfamiliar and alien and entirely counterintuitive.

"This is a wonderful time to be alive," says Valentine, "when everything you knew is wrong!"

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