Keeping the ‘ news’ in the paper
In the future, printed newspaper may be a niche product, but new technology will still deliver daily news to readers, experts predict
Fifty years ago, prognosticators looked towards 2012 and confidently predicted flying cars.
Sadly it hasn’t happened, and the family sedan is still firmly tethered to terra firma.
Which suggests that the business of forecasting what form this newspaper is likely to be in 50 years hence is a trifle daunting.
But the prophets of doom who are predicting the demise of newspapers should think twice. Throughout the eras of radio, television and now the Internet, the newspaper industry has proved to be remarkably durable and adaptable.
“Newspapers haven’t disappeared by a long shot,” said Al Tompkins, who teaches at the Poynter Institute and is the author of Aim for the Heart: Write, Shoot, Report and Produce for TV and Multimedia. “That has been predicted for a long time, and I hear a fair number of people say that television is going away and radio is going away and that’s a lot of nonsense.
“Of course television’s going to be around, and of course newspapers are going to be around. However, they are going to be around in very different ways.”
The Internet has changed newspapers, just as radio forced newspapers to speed up their news delivery and television prompted them to add more pictures.
It has turned daily print deadlines into constant online deadlines and it has fuelled, not diminished the public’s desire for news.
And it has added a rich dimension to the news — augmenting sources to encompass content that can be delivered by anyone with an online connection.
“The blame always seems to be on technology, that people are going to move to blogs, they are going to rely on what their neighbours say, it always gets framed as an ‘ either or’ but the reality is that it is really both,” said Simon Fraser University communication professor Peter Chow- White.
Fifty years from now we’ll be getting our information from different platforms, some not yet invented.
Tompkins points out it could be electronic paper, technology that’s already here and a platform that would make the news customizable and updatable.
“What is the most important part of the word newspaper? It’s not ‘ paper’ — the most important part of the word newspaper is the word ‘ news’ and the only valuable part of the news is news that you can trust, news that’s true, news that’s verified, news that you know the motivation for gathering that news to start with,” said Tompkins.
“Go back 50 years from now to 1960, did we have any reason to believe we had no need for verified information about the Cuban missile crisis?” he said.
“... Is there any reason to believe we will need less verification 50 years from now or that just any old rumour will do? Absolutely not.
“But how much better off would we have been during the Cuban missile crisis if we could have had voices from Cuba also helping us understand what was going on there?”
University of BC journalism professor Alfred Hermida has his own wish for a future news delivery system — a tiny device, small enough to be inserted in a watch or even a ring that would project an interactive screen onto any surface.
Instead of pulling out your ipad at the coffee shop, you’d flick the screen on and your news would appear on the table, just as in the days people would open a newspaper and spread it on the table.
Hermida sees news printed on paper as becoming a niche item, perhaps not convenient and by no means the most efficient way to get news but appealing to a small number
of readers in the way vinyl records still hold appeal for some audiophiles.
In 50 years the idea of a package that includes everything from a crossword puzzle to sports scores, political news and recipes may have disappeared.
“The Vancouver Sun will think of itself as less of a newspaper and more as filling an informational need,” said Hermida.
Journalists will still play a role but they will be sharing the news space, much as they do today.
“Journalism is not a profession to be defended but a practice to be shared,” said Hermida. The biggest unknown rests with Gen Xs and Gen Ys. “People today who are 50 to 75 are in the sweet spot of newspaper consumption and they are the only generation to have straddled those two technologies — electronic and paper,” said Tompkins. “Fifty years from now those people will be gone and we will have people in the sweet spot who have never consumed information solely by paper. It’s going to be a huge shift when boomers die.
“Trying to predict what Gen X and Gen Ys will do in terms of information consumption is a highly speculative sport,” he said.