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January 2003

How Technology Will Change Journalism

By Dorian Benkoil

Why should video gamers be having all the fun?

Former Wired editor Katrina Heron asked that question at a Stanford University lecture.

“We're alive in an era of unprecedented innovation in communication tools,” she said. “Why aren't journalists and publishers experimenting more with these new tools?”

Why, indeed. Last summer, nearly three dozen journalists, academics, students, consultants and businesspeople gathered at the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis to experience, dream and heatedly discuss various new and experimental technologies.

The seminar, titled “Sensing the News,” was the third in a series in which INMS brought media professionals, thinkers and educators together to quite literally play with emerging technologies.

The group -- including former MSNBC.com chief editor Merrill Brown, former World News Tonight and NBC Evening News executive producer Jeff Gralnick, UC Berkeley new media program director Paul Grabowicz, and other academics and working journalists -- saw various cutting-edge versions of what’s called “immersive” media: 360-degree video, 3-D still and moving pictures, a sound “poetry” game, new Web cameras and handheld devices, video chat technology and more.

The unrefined technologies covered a wide swath and worked well or poorly to varying degrees. But over three days, a few themes consistently emerged: bandwidth is increasing; costs of recording and transmitting over these bandwidths are going down; and news gathering is becoming easier to do in a sophisticated way for more people. That was the easy part.

More challenging was trying to figure out how we’d use all the new stuff, and what it will do to and for journalism. To try to answer those questions, we broke into smaller groups, including one that envisioned how new technologies would affect future cyber-journalists. This smaller group posited that within a decade people would become much more comfortable with consuming their news on whatever gadgets they happened to have at hand.

We also guessed that digital devices would connect to each other much more seamlessly than now. Just as anyone on a phone anywhere in the world can talk to anyone else on any other kind of phone, so, too, to a much greater degree than now, with coming generations of digital devices. Stories, images, conversations, information and other bits and bytes will be sent around the block or the world at light speed from everywhere to anywhere – and not just by journalists with supped-up satellite phones.

We determined that the technologies would strengthen emerging trends and force newspeople to change the way they gathered, produced and disseminated news and information. The trends, and possible implications, included:

	Convenience – consumers get what they want, when. You, as newsperson, may not know the device the consumer is using or how they'll use it, and, thus, will not know how your news product is consumed. (Moving pictures? Audio? Sound? In what order? And so on.) Does every news package have to be both linear and modular, something that can be consumed starting at the beginning, middle or end?
	Manipulability - true customization, personalization, data-sifting. News organizations' pre-set subject categories become much less relevant. Someone can organize according to personal preference -- Tiger Woods, hormone therapy, parenting information, Intel Corp., whatever -- rather than generalities such as "National," "International," "Health," and so on. Will the newsperson have to make the material so it can be sliced and diced by anyone according to any criteria? Will he or she have to struggle to tag material by various subject keywords to assure the largest numbers of people see it? How refined will image- and audio-searching become; will everyone be able to get only whatever chunk(s) they want?
	Portability - anything, anywhere, anytime. No one tethered to a fixed device. How will this change your concept of what you as newsperson produce? What if someone’s watching while commuting? Sitting down to dinner? How would you present the news differently if they were potentially getting your piece in their swimming goggles while doing laps?
	Ubiquitous Collection - A Webcam on every lamppost? Does everyone (who has a portable digital device that can record sound or images) become a news gatherer? See this piece by technology writer Dan Gillmor for a look at how that future may already be here. Or a prediction from writer Clive Thomson that within the year we’ll see pictures from some disaster site in Hong Kong or Tokyo beamed to us from witnesses using their cellphone cameras. The implications of this phenomenon go much farther. Will these technologies obviate the need for a lot of professional news gatherers? Why “send a crew” to a disaster scene if witnesses on scene are already beaming back every kind of imaginable picture and sound and can be co-opted to the task? Do editors and producers become sifters as much as analyzers and interpreters? What if, asked team member Rex Sorgatz, GPS data can be sorted and sifted to note movements of crowds in real time?
	Ubiquitous Dissemination - The counterpart to much of the above. For the news provider, this may mean that, rather than putting your pieces together to be read, listened to, or watched on a small screen, you may have to package them so they can be received on anything from a desktop computer, to a palm-held wireless device, a chip-enabled TV, car dashboard, holographic projection or, say, a biochip implant in someone’s neck. You, as news conveyor, may have much less control of what an audience sees or hears of what you've done, or when or where they see or hear it. Artificial intelligence may play a role, parsing and sending news according to patterns it identifies, to users whose patterns it “knows”. Will newspeople lose large amounts of control over how what they produce is consumed? Perhaps you’ll lose control of the narrative stream.
	Ease of Use - Both for the news gatherers and consumers. What happens to camerapeople, producers, and so on, when anyone can operate anything and technical expertise is less of an issue? When you don’t have to be a “coder” or even a computer graphics specialist to produce a compelling interactive graphic? Or when someone trying to get the news can work any device without knowing a thing about terms like “operating system,” “network card,” “plug in,” “connection speed” or even “software.”
	Legal/Rights Issues - Will the government, mindful of the large numbers of news gatherers, instead more tightly control and perhaps even sell access to "events" it "stages"? ("The Gulf War, Exclusively on CNN.") If everyone is a news gatherer, and everyone can be in the news at any time, even as a micro-bit of demographic data, what are the potential privacy and legal issues? Will disaster and celebrity photos become more of a commodity?

In a separate role-play, the team came up with a hypothetical scenario for managing the news flow and trying to pay for it all. A hard-bitten reporter, and 15-year-old girl armed with nothing but a picture-taking and sending device, sold their wares to a publisher who was more of a packager, who in turn sold to a re-packager, while a “game-module broker” made plenty of electronic cash by getting his latest scenes out to the highest video game bidder. (Check out more on the role-plays, as well as a different summary of the above, here. The role play summaries are fun, and fascinating.)

The team didn’t reach strong conclusions, but I’ll take a stab here. I believe that the journalism of the future will require supreme specialization by some (builders, say, of graphics in the Flash, Java or the latest whatever), and extreme generalization by others who will have to report and package news so that it can be consumed in everything from superficial bite-sized chunks to maximum depth from multiple access points.

For those in the field, the more ways you can gather and send your story, the stronger journalist you’ll be. For editors and producers, you’ll be stronger the more ways you can re-jigger and package it.

Journalists may even be in for a sea change. Digital technology may revamp what the public thinks of as “news” just as television and radio remade what had been a world ruled by print. If the news “platform” becomes irrelevant, and the audience segment (the “demographic” some would say) is ill-defined because any group can get any piece of anything it finds relevant, will the cyberjournalist be someone who gathers massive quantities of journalistic “data” that can be parsed in numerous ways? Or will the need for intelligent sifting and analysis become ever more crucial to help the info-harried user rise above the cyber-torrent?

The answer, I believe, is: both. We’ll see a strengthening of the trend we already have witnessed of an increasing division between journalists who gather and disseminate news and information, and those who sort, sift and analyze. Those who can tell a compelling narrative – especially in multiple media – will become increasingly powerful and sought after. The day may be approaching when an interactive graphic will be as rich as the most immersive video game and will tell a news story so grippingly that the audience, built through word of mouth, and consumed on screens of all sizes, will dwarf a similar story presented on TV or in print. The person creating it will have to be both a journalist and an artist who is deft and can work instinctively in the newest media.

And be someone who knows how to have as much fun with it all as a video gamer.