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Predictions are futile

The future of media will be nothing like what we think. Just consider what we thought the future would look like 15 years ago.

By Dan Kennedy

Remarks delivered at the Ford Hall Forum at Northeastern University, Sept. 21, 2005, in a joint appearance with Jay Rosen of New York University. Moderated by Stephen Burgard, director of the Northeastern School of Journalism.

If there's one thing that Jay Rosen and I agree on - and I suspect we're going to agree more than we disagree this evening - it's that we are still at the very beginning of figuring out how blogging is going to change journalism, and what role citizens' voices will play in a news media transformed by technology. What will the mediascape look like 10 or 15 years from now? Perhaps we can gain a little bit of insight - or at least humility - by considering how wrong we got it 10 or 15 years ago.

In the early 1990s I had a chance to attend a seminar on the future of media at Columbia University. One of the speakers was Roger Fidler, then with Knight Ridder, now at Kent State. This was around the time that Knight Ridder was unveiling the San Jose Mercury News's widely admired online venture, Mercury Center, which was available only to members of America Online. Remember, this was pre-Web.

Fidler dazzled us with a vision of the technological utopia to come. Within a decade or so, he predicted, newspapers and magazines would largely be replaced with high-resolution digital tablets - laptops without keyboards - that would be about the size, thickness and flexibility of a copy of Time or Newsweek. These tablets would be so cheap that newspapers would give them away, making up the cost with the money they'd save by no longer having to process millions of dead trees and deliver them to people's homes.

Every evening, Fidler predicted, you would plug your tablet into a docking station, which would most likely be part of your digital cable box. While you slept, your tablet would receive content that you had already paid for: say, local news and sports from the Boston Globe, international news from the New York Times and national and political news from the Washington Post. You'd receive magazines this way, too: instant delivery of Sports Illustrated and the New Yorker, with no more waiting for your mail-carrier to finish reading them before putting them in your mailbox.

What about single-copy sales? Fidler had that covered, too. He envisioned urban newsstands giving way to kiosks where you could plug in your tablet and pay by credit card, or perhaps with some form of digital cash.

Fidler's scenario did include some limited interactivity delivered through a wireless network, such as advertisements that you could tap with a PDA-like pen for further information and full video. If it were a restaurant ad, there would presumably be some way of making a reservation. But, essentially, Fidler's future, at least as I understood it (I don't want to blame Fidler for what may have been a failure of the imagination on my part), was one in which the media of 1992 were simply dragged into a technological future with little change and few new players.

Now, you'll note that, in some ways, Fidler's vision was too technologically advanced. Today's laptop computers are far more expensive, and their displays of much lower resolution, than Fidler thought they would be by 2005. We'll get there, but not for a while.

But the single biggest thing that Fidler - and everyone else - got wrong was the Web, which would soon transform the way we interact with the media. I'm sure that Fidler, who was ahead of everyone, knew about the Web, which was right on the cusp of breaking through. But no one understood its importance. In the early '90s, the smartest people in media saw a closed technological future, one in which people might have more choices, but that would still be dominated by major news organizations and a paid-subscriber model.

Instead, that was all swept away. Major news organizations do very well on the Web, of course - Boston.com, NYTimes.com and washingtonpost.com are among the most popular sites. But they must compete with a wide range of Web content, from established entities such as Salon and Slate, to rogue gossipers such as Matt Drudge, to thousands of bloggers who provide their own news and commentary, and who see themselves as an emerging alternative to what they derisively call the "MSM," for mainstream media. And, as we all know, the lack of success news organizations have had with charging a fee for their Web-based incarnations is threatening their financial futures - and, thus, their ability to do the kind of deep reporting that gives the MSM real value. Just yesterday, the New York Times Co. announced significant cutbacks that will result in the loss of about 35 newsroom positions at the Globe, which it owns. I suspect the Times Co. is also going to find out how difficult it is to charge for content starting this week. As many of you may know, the Times is now charging for online access to columnists and other so-called premium features.

(A quick aside: You may have noticed that I referred to "thousands of bloggers." As of this morning, Technorati.com claimed to be tracking 17.7 million blogs, an increase of 400,000 since this past Saturday. Does anyone believe this? I said "thousands" because I'm talking only about those that are attempting to take part in the civic conversation in a substantive way. In fact, perhaps "hundreds" would be even more accurate.)

Now, I happen to like blogs. I write one, there are a few I read every day, and there are many more that I check in on from time to time. But I have to admit that I'm somewhat conservative in my enthusiasm for blogs. Christopher Lydon, whose intriguing new radio show, "Open Source," depends on bloggers for many of its program ideas, likes to ask what would happen if the New York Times were written by its readers, who are, after all, as well-educated and well-informed as any newspaper readership in the world. I have an answer: it would instantly become a pretty lousy paper.

There are many ways in which readers - citizens - can contribute to journalism, and people like Jay and Chris Lydon are on the leading edge of figuring out how to use the Internet in order to do that. But I suspect the readers of the New York Times would be as adept at producing their own newspaper as they would be at growing their own food or performing their own surgery. We live in an age of specialization. And if those of us in the media often fall short of providing the sort of quality journalism that we promise - and, believe me, we fall short every day - we still do a far better job of it than we would if we simply turned everything over to amateurs, no matter how talented and eloquent some of those amateurs are.

Thus my favorite blogs, not surprisingly, tend to be those produced by professional journalists, including Jay Rosen, whose PressThink blog is the best there is at tracking - and advocating for - the burgeoning citizen-journalist movement. The one blog I visit multiple times every day is Jim Romenesko's media-news site on Poynter.org, a smart, well-edited compilation of media news, gossip and memos from around the country. Romenesko's a real journalist who's worked for a number of publications, including, just before he went to Poynter, the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Romenesko is essentially nonpartisan. For a conservative equivalent, I go to James Taranto's "Best of the Web," on the Wall Street Journal's website, OpinionJournal.com. The liberal equivalent, MediaMatters.org, is produced by another professional journalist, David Brock. For liberal commentary, there's Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo.com and Danny Schechter's News Dissector blog. Both Marshall and Schechter are journalists who've worked for a number of mainstream outlets. For conservative commentary, there's AndrewSullivan.com, written by yet another professional journalist. Perhaps the best non-journalist blog that I read regularly is InstaPundit, by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, another conservative. But you'd expect a law professor to know how to amass evidence, write and argue, wouldn't you?

What I'm suggesting is that the most rewarding aspect of the blogging revolution to date is not that it's empowered ordinary citizens, but, rather, that it has provided another, less filtered outlet to professionals who might otherwise struggle to distinguish themselves and be heard. Josh Marshall once told me that he saw Talking Points Memo as his equivalent of I.F. Stone's Weekly, except that it costs him far less to produce, and enables him to reach far more people, than Stone himself was ever able to. That's truly revolutionary.

This doesn't mean there isn't a place for citizen voices in the emerging media world. We've all been enthralled, and even moved, by how NOLA.com, a website affiliated with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, has used blogging and online forums to report on the disaster that befell their city. The site enabled ordinary citizens to submit photos, news and commentary, and, in many instances, upload posts letting their family and friends know they were all right. As Jay has assiduously documented, the Greensboro News-Record, in North Carolina, is transforming that city's daily newspaper into an ongoing conversation among its citizens. One of my favorite blogs, Universal Hub, produced by - yes - a professional journalist named Adam Gaffin, compiles the best of dozens of Boston-area citizen blogs, providing one-stop reading for those of us who want to get a taste without spending hours upon hours wading through dozens of blogs.

But there are limits to how far this revolution can go. We have no idea what the future will look like. And, as my own experience some dozen years ago suggests, any predictions we make now are likely to be overtaken by developments we can't even conceive of right now. With that said, I'd like to offer a few observations and cautions about where we're all heading.

1. People don't have as much time as the visionaries think they do. A newspaper's best readers will give up an hour, tops, out of their day. Realistically, many people will give you about 15 minutes. I'm not being cynical. As we all know, people are working harder than ever just to survive in an increasingly Darwinian economy. In a culture in which we're more and more disengaged from the very idea of community, the news simply doesn't seem as important as it did a generation or two ago, when we lived in the shadow of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. That's why young people, in particular, are spending so little time with the news, even when they're online, as David Mindich of Saint Michael's College reported last year in his book "Tuned Out." To use Robert Putnam's phrase, we're all bowling alone now, and though technology gives us the tools to form a new type of community, it doesn't necessarily give us and more time or inclination to do so than we had before.

In contrast to this, advocates of citizen journalism constantly push at us the idea of more and deeper information - putting documents that you can't fit into the paper on your website; publishing a metastasizing body of reader comments online; supplementing op-ed pages with more and more columnists on the Web; and giving particularly energetic readers blogs to cover the kinds of hyperlocal stories that journalists themselves can't get to. This sounds great. But who is going to read all this stuff?

A newspaper stands as a theory of what's important. And a crucial element of that theory is making decisions about what to leave out. A reader wants to believe that if she spends 15 minutes with her morning paper, she'll learn something important about her community and the world, and that if she spends an hour, she'll learn a lot. If she's constantly bombarded with messages to go to the website for more, more, more, she may conclude that becoming a truly well-informed person is an impossible task. Our job is to help our readers make sense of their world, not add to the overload and confusion they're already experiencing.

2. Blogging could become yet another symptom of the fractiousness that has already diminished our sense of a common culture. The late social critic Neil Postman, who was a colleague of Jay's at New York University, once said that the front page of the New York Times was among the most essential cultural documents we have, because it lays out very clearly what is important on any given day - and what isn't. Postman certainly wasn't endorsing the Times' vision of what was important. Rather, his point was that the front page of the Times gave us a common starting point that we could accept, reject, argue over or propose alternatives to. Walter Cronkite - "the most trusted man in America," as the saying went - performed much the same function.

Now, thanks to Internet news sources and blogs, you can, if you choose, immerse yourself in an ideological world that you never have to leave. Liberals can bathe in the warm waters of the Daily Kos and Atrios. Conservatives, if they can be induced to turn off the Fox News Channel for a few moments, can reinforce their views by logging on to Power Line and Little Green Footballs. We all need to be challenged, and the Internet makes it easy for us not to challenge ourselves.

That doesn't mean bloggers can't also help re-create a sense of community. I'm thinking of someone like Lisa Williams, who blogs about events going on in nearby Watertown at H2oTown.info. But I think the weight of the blogging movement has been more to comfort the comfortable in ever-narrower niches, and to afflict only those who have already been cast as villains or worse.

3. Blogging is no substitute for real reporting. Perhaps the most useful and visible role for bloggers is that of amateur media critics. I think it's done all of us a world of good to know that smart readers are looking over our shoulders and letting us know when we screw up. I've often thought that I'd like to post anything I write for print for 24 hours before deadline so that I could incorporate the comments and corrections I receive. But, unless a blogger is going to start doing the sort of deep reporting that the best journalists do, there are real limits to the information value of that person's blog.

I think the fall of Dan Rather is perhaps the best illustration of what I'm talking about. CBS News' humiliation over the phony documents about President Bush's National Guard service may never have become a story without the bloggers. But it never would have come to a conclusion without reporting by the mainstream media.

Today, what we tend to remember is that conservative bloggers discovered that the documents - purportedly typed in the early 1970s - had almost certainly been produced on a computer of recent vintage. Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, performed an especially impressive feat, printing out a document that looked almost identical to the one CBS News obtained using Microsoft Word's default settings. (An aside: Johnson's feat never would have been possible were it not for CBS News' own laudably transparent use of the Web. After all, if CBS hadn't posted high-quality copies of the documents on its website, bloggers could not have examined them for themselves.)

What we tend to forget is that liberal bloggers, some of them with impressive expertise in typography, were arguing at the same time that the documents could only have been produced by a certain brand of electric typewriter available in the early '70s. I was covering this story at the time, and believe me, the posts defending the authenticity of the documents were every bit as persuasive as those excoriating it. After all, what knowledge did I have in obscure matters of typewriters and fonts? The bloggers had more expertise than I did, which, as Dan Gillmor points out in his book "We the Media," is exactly how things are supposed to work in the new-media age. The problem was that they disagreed with each other, not only on substantive, technical grounds but also, I think, on the basis of their own ideological predilections. It reminded me of what I once heard an MIT scientist say about the problem of using expert witnesses in complicated legal cases: "For every Ph.D., there is an equal and opposite anti-Ph.D."

Fortunately, or unfortunately if you're Dan Rather or Mary Mapes, the bloggers were able to gain the attention of the mainstream media. Led by media outlets such as ABC News, the Dallas Morning News and the Washington Post, we learned that CBS News had ignored the cautions issued by its own experts, and that the documents were, at best, retyped from the originals or, at worst, forgeries. In other words, the bloggers drew first blood, but it was the dread MSM that finally rooted out the truth.
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What will the next 10 to 15 years bring? As I tried to suggest when I opened, we have no idea. I'm sure that we'll still be trying to figure this out long after Jay, Steve and I have retired. But I do know this: if we try simply to imagine a future based on more, better and faster versions of what we have now, we're bound to get it wrong. Just last year, podcasting came out of nowhere, and someday it may challenge corporate-owned radio. Similar breakthroughs are just over the horizon. It's going to be a wild ride, and it's only just begun.

Copyright © 2005 by Dan Kennedy