From a 1981 TV news report....
It’s no surprise (considering how long it took me to master the simple art of posting youtube videos to this blog), that I never guessed how quickly the ‘fantasy’ described in this report would become reality.
It’s amazing that this report was filed in 1981. That was several years before I graduated from Journalism school, yet I don’t recall ever hearing a word about this “experiment,” or similar predictions about the future of journalism, while I was at J-school.
In fact, just having computers in classrooms was then a novelty. Maybe the biggest untold story - lost within the many recent stories about the ‘demise’ of print journalism & newspapers - is that it appears so many of us collectively failed to see it coming...apparently or allegedly...even when it was dead ahead, like the Titanic about to hit an iceberg.
As the report indicates, the future of journalism (as of 1981) is a hybrid of print and electronic news gathering (ENG, remember that term?), “newspapers on personal computers,” with people, fancy this, sipping their morning coffee in front of a computer as they read the news. That scenario describes my morning routine at least five-six days of the week. How about you?
With all that’s transpired in this struggling business, and even more job losses announced just today, I don’t want to kick anyone feeling down. But how did we get this one so wrong? Like George W. Bush might say, it was quite a “misunderestimation.”
Watch the item carefully, and note which American newspapers are involved in the “experiment.” Most are now in serious financial trouble, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which in January filed in the U.S. for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
Adapting to change is necessary for survival, whether one is talking about a person, a business or a person working within a business.
Some successful online-only news sites, such as The Tyee (thetyee.ca ), have been around for years. It owes its success to the vision of founding editor David Beers. Getting in on the ground floor meant thetyee.ca established and now enjoys a solid reputation for journalistic integrity, and it built a reliable core of readers. According to its site, it gets about 15,000 hits daily.
Many of us who love newspapers fret about whether or not they’ll survive. We reminisce about the days when the newspaper pages were pasted up with wax, as they were still when I began working in 1989 at The Ottawa Citizen. And we recall working in an environment that reeked of ink. And we remember when it all mattered so much. Those were the days; they are well and truly over.
As a wise man once said, the medium is the message. And as the medium of delivery changes, so does the message. Does that mean journalism is dying or does that mean it's changing? I guess that’s up to those of us who continue to practise it, regardless of the form in which the information is presented.
Many journalists have been laid off, but so have auto-workers, health care providers and even Starbucks’ baristas.
It’s not clear if printed newspapers will still be around in 2020. Maybe they won’t, but does that necessarily mean our society will suffer for it or be less of a democracy? Will sites like thetyee.ca, the Huffington Post, or The Walrus survive and ensure a knowledge gap doesn't emerge?
Will our society’s general level of literacy decline without easy access to papers and print magazines? Will a gap emerge between the very literate and those who get their “news” from celebrity gossip websites?
People under the age of 35, especially those younger than 30, have vastly different news-consumption habits than those over 35. Many have no interest in daily news and are cynical about journalism as a profession. Will they eventually seek information elsewhere or will they just be uninformed and uninvolved?
The questions hang in the air like clouds of ink in an antiquated press room.
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