As Jane Dobija noted in her call to this conference, the introduction
of new technologies has already created alterations and dislocations in
the journalism profession; and there are many changes still to come. Change
will occur, of course, in different ways at different rates of speed in
different parts of the world. But for any young journalist, anywhere, looking
ahead to a career measured in decades, the new technologies of cyberspace
are bound to have an impact; and for those journalists who are willing
to learn new methods, professional opportunities will grow rather than
diminish.
The focus of the conference is necessarily on the tools of the trade,
not on the character, commitment, and standards which in this, as in any
profession, determine how well the tools are used. But the fact is that
the tools, and the skills needed to employ them, are changing fast. A successful
career in journalism will depend, at least in part, on their mastery. And
it will also depend in part on an understanding of how the new technologies
are reshaping the operations of the fewer and fewer, larger and larger
media conglomerates, whose global news operations include newspapers, magazines,
television, radio and new media under a single corporate ownership.
The Internet and Beyond
In the last few years, the package of technologies known as the Internet
has made some deep inroads into the culture of the print newsroom. Hundreds
of daily newspapers in dozens of countries have begun publishing on-line
versions which are essentially clones of their newsprint editions. The
way was prepared for this extension into digital electronic publishing
by the prior introduction, over the past 20 years, of Atex, Scitex and
the many other digital text editing, scanning, and page layout systems
in most metropolitan newsrooms. But the growth of Internet publishing by
newspapers has, more often than not, stirred up internal frictions among
the staff which are hampering the further development of this medium.
Broadcast and cable news organizations, on the other hand, are creating
Internet editions which differ in several important respects from their
print counterparts. First, there is much less resistance to continual updating
of content; and second, as discussed later in this paper, there is a greater
readiness to follow where the Internet naturally leads- to greater connectivity
and interaction with the public by making feedback an integral part of
the news gathering process. Due to their greater familiarity with digital
technologies, these organizations, with cable as the gateway, have been
more active than newspapers in forming alliances with telephone companies,
software developers and other strategic partners.
The Internet has also blurred some of the lines of distinction which
traditionally separated different elements of the news gathering process.
The wire services, to identify them by a now-outdated name, have always
existed primarily to serve as wholesalers of news to their client newspapers
and broadcasters which deliver news directly to the public. But now, due
mainly to the Internet, the public for the first time has direct access
to Reuters, to the Associated Press and other global wire services, in
direct competition with the traditional client base. And because of the
advanced technologies already in use by these global news organizations,
their services are well adapted to present and future digital distribution
directly to the public.
Equally significant is the Internet's ability to turn sources into
publishers, occasionally eliminating the middleman. Ever since Franklin
Roosevelt's radio broadcasts of the 1930s, politicians and interest groups
have sought ways to by-pass the media and tell their story directly to
the public. Today, heads of state and government ministries maintain their
own web sites, many of them full of well-indexed and generally reliable
information useful to students, scholars, and the general public, all of
whom are invited to respond with their own views. The information resources
now available directly to the public through this official version of samizdat
present a growing challenge to journalists, both to be aware of what is
already available and to provide added value.
Even now, the journalists who cover complex subjects such as medicine,
law, science and the environment for the major dailies such as The New
York Times are often respected figures in their own right whose work can
withstand expert scrutiny. Recently, for example, the University of North
Carolina established a new program devoted entirely to medical journalism.
For specialized coverage, this demand is likely to intensify, even if the
deterioration of quality in general news and features reporting continues
at its present pace.
The Second Stage
Although most of journalism's current web sites are fairly direct transfers
of format and concept, the Internet can accommodate entirely new forms
which meet the growing public appetite for networking, communicating, and
sharing knowledge and opinions. As many observers have noted, the expectations
of the Internet user differ from those of a reader or listener or passive
viewer. There is an expectation now, especially among young adults, that
one's own individual view is important and should be an integral part in
the gradual construction of a collective view on any important topic. This
can be called networking or constructivism or relationship-building, but
by whatever name it is very real and very international. Up to now, print
editors and writers have conveyed the impression, rightly or wrongly, that
they see themselves in an ex cathedra capacity. The attitude of their competition
will be very different, as CNN's chat room already demonstrates.
This second stage, of news services designed from the beginning for
digital interactive distribution, will have new participants, especially
the software giants, whose attraction to daily journalism is already apparent.
Microsoft, the industry leader, has formed one well-known strategic alliance
with NBC for a 24-hour news service distributed both on cable and the Internet.
It has purchased substantial equity in one of the largest cable operators,
Comcast. And its new subsidiary, WebTV Networks, Inc. is now introducing
set-top boxes which convert the home television set into a high- speed,
interactive work station and entertainment center.
But perhaps even more significant is its new metropolitan information
service, Sidewalk, which is being offered successively in major American
cities including New York, Washington, San Francisco and others, competing
directly with the metropolitan daily press for information about special
events, arts and entertainment- and, of course, for advertisers. The large
advertising agencies, on whom the American and European newspaper industries
depend for most of their revenue, view these new possibilities very favorably;
and the advertising managers of the large newspaper chains with papers
in many different cities recognize the competitive threat this represents.
To establish this service, Microsoft has been hiring local journalists
to cover these subjects; and it is not difficult to imagine that Sidewalk
will soon add local hard news to its coverage. Developments like these
offer merely a glimpse of future prospects for the software industry's
entry into and redefinition of daily journalism, with the collaboration
of cable, telephone, and wireless transmission companies. And these developments
can quickly become global, given the ease with which the Internet crosses
national borders. In fact, the World Wide Web is second only to shortwave
radio, that massive and growing border-crosser which most effectively serves
the needs of the less-developed world.
Thus, the aggregate of technologies which we now call the Internet
is evolving in at least two stages. The first is the direct transfer of
formats from one medium to another, as typified by the web sites of the
daily newspapers. Although these have proliferated, they are likely to
encounter continuing resistance from the print newsroom in their effort
to advance. As one expert observer of the struggle noted recently, the
relationship between the print staff and the on-line staff is often "marked
by caution and dotted with tension," explaining the problem this way:
"For many print newsrooms, on-line was a mandate, not a belief.
Tons of time and money were being thrown at a service that, for quite a
while, would be infinitesimal in comparison with the print product reach.
And if it grew faster than that, didn't it threaten your print operation,
not to mention your base of power?" (Dominique Paul Noth, Guest Editor,
Newspaper Association of America, Internet 18 Sep 97).
Newspaper sites, like many other content sites presently found on the
Internet, are directly linked to a host medium- and this points out a significant
economic fact. For the foreseeable future, it's not possible to conceive
that the web site of a traditional news organization, no matter how frequently
accessed, could on its own support the cost of a traditional newsroom and
news bureaus. For a traditional newspaper (although not necessarily for
its corporate owner), the Internet is unlikely ever to become more than
an adjunct- a part of the whole.
The second stage of the evolution involves the gradual emergence of
new forms which are made possible by the new technologies and depends on
the entry of different industries with a richer base of technology and
capital. Powerful new corporate combinations are emerging. Cable companies
and telephone companies are already joining in strategic alliances with
the software industry and even in some cases merging their companies. Telephony's
rapidly advancing ATM switching technology, addressability, and growing
fiber optic networks, in combination with cable's coaxial cable connections
into homes, schools, and offices, provide the basis for a new range of
broadband services including telecommunications, data transmission, news
and information, shopping, banking and personal services, and entertainment
on demand.
This important term "broadband" is a kind of shorthand to
describe the combination of technologies which can be used to communicate
still and moving imagery, sound, text and data separately or in common
at high rates of speed measured in the number of bits (zeros and ones)
transmitted every second. The growth of broadband services will require
massive injections of technology and capital from a new combination of
industries which can readily bring these resources to bear, but which are
unschooled in the standards of the journalism profession.
Newspapers and Beyond
We need newspapers. Because they have no need for an allocation of
frequency spectrum, they by-pass a difficult licensing process and with
it the real or implied threat of government controls. Newspapers still
represent the best and most penetrating journalism of any medium. They
have the deepest understanding of the standards and ethics which should
govern the profession, and they most clearly recognize the dangers which
have been created by the decline of independent ownership and the increase
of a more distant corporate ownership with a primary focus on the bottom
line of each operating division.
But for an industry which was one of the first adopters of innovations
such as the wireless telegraph, teletype, telephone and facsimile, newspapers,
as distinct from their corporate owners, have been oddly resistant to the
massive changes now occurring as digital technologies grow more sophisticated
with every advance in chip technology. Ironically, an industry which historically
embraced each advance in the speed and reliability of telecommunications
has fallen behind its own readership in the comprehension and acceptance
of digital communications.
The health of newspaper publishing varies widely throughout the world.
In America, newspaper circulation has been declining steadily as younger
people have rejected the daily newspaper habit and with continuing suburbanization.
Even the best of our newspapers, The New York Times, experienced
a decline of four per cent in weekday circulation and six per cent on Sundays
in a recent six-month reporting period. Although the Times -- like
any other paper which can be described either as the predominant morning
daily in a particular metropolitan area or the predominant suburban weekly
-- is not in any way mortally threatened, those general-purpose newspapers
which fail to meet either of these precise definitions, such as afternoon
or other second papers in the market, or those with a broad, thin distribution,
must soon find alternatives to ink on newsprint if they are to preserve
the value of their franchise.
In Eastern Europe, with its high degree of literacy and new freedom
of expression, the daily press may not be faced with exactly the same challenges
today but probably will be in the future. Because of the steady march of
media consolidation into fewer and larger global conglomerates, any major
trend in one country will, sooner or later, have at least a secondary effect
elsewhere.
Up to the moment of delivering the final product, newspapers were early
adopters of new technology. Editorial staffs have long since entered the
digital world of automated text editing and page layout. The space once
occupied by the composing room now often stands empty. The newspaper newsroom
has, for decades now, been characterized by an array of desk-top computers.
Especially in the case of a national newspaper, the true end product at
deadline is a digital signal transmitted by satellite to the rooftops of
remote printing plants hundreds or thousands of miles away. Only across
the final tens of miles does the day's edition become, at great cost, a
physical product.
The S Word: Synergy
For over a decade, the MIT Media Lab has kept telling us, often in
the face of ridicule, that we are now truly in the digital era, the era
of distributing bits, not atoms. Bits are inexhaustible. They don't devour
trees or choke up landfills. But most significantly, they can coalesce
in any of several media required by the consumer. As the Director of the
Media Lab said to The New York Times a few years ago:
"All of these groups- newspapers, radio or television- are really
in the same business. We've always thought video or audio or data are different
businesses. But today, when you radiate bits, these bits don't have to
have a specific medium attached to them." (Nicholas Negroponte, NYT
4 Mar 93).
Although the notion of cross-media synergies has been resisted fiercely
by print newsrooms, the economic promise implicit in Negroponte's comments
will ultimately overwhelm the barriers erected by traditional news cultures.
Even if print journalists continue to resist the onset of synergy, of unified
newsrooms and bureaus which serve a multimedia news publishing organization,
economics will sooner or later outweigh the continuance of separate, parallel
news-gathering operations for each medium. If this cannot be accomplished
under a single corporate roof, the alternative may be a series of strategic
alliances to accomplish the same purpose. For the younger journalist in
the field or on the editorial staff, this is an important harbinger, because
the greatest opportunities will probably flow to those journalists who
can most easily cross the disciplinary lines.
In a media-integrated news center, all incoming text, voice, video,
still images and other graphics will be stored immediately in a common
digital base, sometimes called a digital refinery, out of which news, features,
or background material in any of the media can be retrieved, often at a
single work station, and then edited and formatted to meet a range of different
customer needs and distribution methods. A few minutes spent scanning the
web sites of Microsoft and other software and media enterprises should
offer sufficient proof that this is not a distant vision.
Television and Beyond
In television news centers, the prospect of a full life-cycle digital
news process has been more readily accepted and has already led to new
ventures and new alliances which, although still in their infancy, are
growing rapidly. We've come to understand slowly that text is more than
ink on paper, that audio is more than radio, and now we're beginning to
understand that video is more than television. If, as seems likely, a new
trend continues to develop toward lower cost and greater ease in gathering
video news throughout the world, full-motion video will find its way to
many new uses, often involving news on demand by subject, frequently updated.
And, as all surveys continue to demonstrate, whenever video news is available,
it will continue to draw the largest public and win the greatest level
of trust.
Many articles have been written about the coming battle between television
and the personal computer. The reality is almost certain to be convergence
rather than competition. In America, the leadership for this convergence
is most likely to be provided by a coalition of software companies, cable
networks and operators, and telephone companies, co-developing set-top
units which will convert the TV screen into a large, high-quality monitor
for interactive services. In other countries, direct broadcast satellite
signals may play a larger role than cable. One of the services, as noted
earlier, will be metropolitan news and information- local headline news,
film, television, and radio listings, event schedules, retail and classified
advertising- all requiring high start- up investment but lower operating
costs than ink on newsprint and providing direct competition to the local
press both for users and advertisers.
Partly because of the new interrelationship of video and digital technologies,
and partly because of the long-proven public preference for and reliance
on television news, the video news medium is here to stay, and a journalist
with the appropriate video skills will widen his or her assignment opportunities.
This is especially true of what will be the growing number of free-lance
journalists.
Over the last two decades, the rising cost both of maintaining permanent
overseas bureaus and of sending out three or four-man electronic news gathering
crews into the field, combined with the tighter cost control of news departments,
led to a succession of cutbacks, consolidations, and pooling agreements
which sharply reduced the quality and diversity of international television
news coverage.
But one has only to remember the impact of Dan Rather's video reporting
from Tien An Min Square for CBS or Peter Arnett's from Baghdad for CNN
or of the many local and international crews who covered the capitals of
Eastern Europe in 1989 to realize how ingrained the public preference for
on-site television news reporting has become and how highly it is valued
by the public. The demand for video at the scene will remain high, whether
the images are being transmitted to a television screen or a personal computer,
because the flood of information which pours through the screen gives the
viewer the most immediate, first-hand sense of breaking events.
And now we may be witnessing a trend reversal. Although rising costs
have until recently impaired the growth of international news coverage,
the advent of successively smaller digital video cameras, combined with
the greater availability of satellite uplinks, both portable and stationary,
are now making it possible to meet the public demand for video news coverage
of major events at far lower cost. The newest video cameras have already
begun freeing news crews and correspondents from the hundreds of pounds
of cameras, batteries, cables, lenses, and tapes which burdened them in
the past. And more important, they have made it much easier for free-lance
correspondents to be more entrepreneurial in offering video feeds to news
services and networks.
Over the last few years, the Associated Press and others have been
placing first-generation Hi-8 cameras in traditionally print bureaus and
encouraging their correspondents to provide video feeds as well as print
and radio copy. Although relatively few print journalists have been willing,
so far, to cross the line into television, some of the more enterprising
free-lance stringers, including several now working in the Balkans, have
discovered that their opportunities increased dramatically when they learned
how to file text, audio, or video reporting as needed, using light, portable
cameras and equipment.
On this point, journalism as practiced by the international media conglomerates
will probably be no more immune than other major professions to the growing
use of part-time, on- call workers with special skills or special access
to a particular geography or expertise. Overseas news editors have grown
increasingly reliant on stringers; and their Rolodex file is usually close
at hand and frequently used. Some the best free-lancers learned years ago
how to finance a hoped-for assignment by selling the idea to a coalition
of news organizations. In 1989, when Arthur Kent recognized the growing
importance of events in Afghanistan, he put together a financing package
which included commitments from two television networks, CBC and NBC, and
a newspaper, the Observer.
The number of uplink facilities throughout the world is rising fast-
available from common carriers, private services, corporations, and local
radio and television stations. In the future, portable uplinks of growing
sophistication and decreasing size will be an important component of video
news reporting. The combination of small digital cameras, readily available
uplink facilities, growing transponder capacity, and an all-digital sequence
from the camera to the edit room to distribution will in all likelihood
allow global video journalism to remain predominant among the news media.
For younger journalists looking ahead to decades in the profession, the
ability to work in each of these media on a single assignment will obviously
be a great advantage.
Conclusion
Technology is sometimes disruptive. It has undoubtedly been one of
several factors contributing to the decline in the quality of daily journalism
during the last two decades, at least in America. But eventually the new
digital technologies may help, through greater efficiencies and lower costs,
to revitalize this profession which is so important to a healthy society.
The rebirth of independent journalism in Eastern Europe is one of the most
hopeful developments of the late Twentieth Century. Although the work of
establishing, firmly and permanently, the institutions associated with
independent journalism is not yet complete, the progress in parts of Eastern
Europe is impressive. A fresh start is certainly difficult, but it also
has the advantage of being unencumbered by the past.
In the case of technology, as we've discussed, the tools of the trade
in the next 20 years will be different from those of the past. For a journalist
whose main career still lies ahead, the early adoption and confident use
of those tools can be a major assist, not only in personal terms, but also
in helping to raise the standards of journalism in the new century.