by The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation
...New technologies will present new challenges to radio and television news.... [in] four areas:
There are no quick or easy answers to any of those questions...The successful adaptation of news to new media may require certain scenarios:
1) News will become a "killer app." A "killer app" refers to a killer application or a use of technology that causes widespread adoption of particular hardware or software. News, defined as information of interest to the individual, will be one of the significant factors influencing the adoption of new technologies.
2) Consumer choice and control will drive journalism’s successful adaptation to new media. One of the inherent characteristics of these new communication systems is that the audience is elevated to a co-equal level with the news organization and journalist. News organizations that attempt to impose their existing hierarchical structure on the new media ultimately misunderstand the nuance of "interactive" technology and will, in all likelihood, fail to successfully transfer news into new media.
3) News content will not remain the exclusive domain of traditional news organizations. Commercial, governmental, and other non-news organizations may use the "news" to lure their audience toward other information.
4) News professionals should learn to exploit the natural tension between the technical "possibilities" and the economic realities of new media. Reporters and editors must add data management and library science to their journalism skills arsenal.
5) The audience is a complex entity. People resist change and do not easily unlearn old habits and learn new ones. However, lifestyle factors, unrelated to the new media, already are transforming newspaper circulation and radio and TV viewership. As online information-gathering proliferates from the kindergarten classroom to the company cubicle, its "futuristic" perception will give way to greater comfort levels and thus increased audience acceptance of new-media news.
...Generally...the Internet is evolving into a useful tool for reporting and for communications...The Internet’s potential for distributing news...has not yet developed a self-sustaining economic mechanism to support a news cycle...Another technology, interactive TV, had promised a bright future, but has not lived up to its promise.
If journalism is practiced online, it promises to expand the capabilities of a reporter to present material by incorporating original sources of material into a story, such as background or historical documents, or video or audio clips, said Steven Pizzo, senior editor for Web Review magazine. But others question whether an audience conditioned to vegging out in front of the tube will take advantage of those opportunities. The Internet brings not only the ability of news organizations to reach viewers in a different medium, but also empowers viewers to become their own producers, leading to more "news" sources, whether professional and reliable or not.
One of the most interesting [issues is] how new technologies will change the relationships between news and viewer. There [is] some thought that the two would be brought closer together, increasing the trust that has eroded between audience and news producers.
Partly because the technology of the new age attracts the most attention, it is as good a place as any to start. Who hasn’t been dazzled by the wide array of material newly available from around the world at the click of the mouse? Who wasn’t enthralled by the eager projections of the Internet zipping over cable at speeds hundreds of times than that provided by the telephone network, or the suggestion of a wireless future, in which all resources would flow invisibly into your information collection device?
Of those technologies, of course, the Internet is the most prominent. Once merely a quirky network developed by the Pentagon and used primarily by academic researchers and hobbyists, it has exploded into the commercial world with World Wide Web sites for car makers and liquor bottlers and movie makers and dozens of other industries, including news organizations.
For journalism, Pizzo said he believes the Internet can serve a higher purpose. He believes that the Internet, with its multimedia ability and power to link readers to other locations on the Net, can serve the fundamental social purpose of restoring the public’s trust in journalism that has disintegrated over the years. If he is quoting a public figure, for example, Pizzo said, he "could have Real Audio clip, a 2-minute clip and just invite the reader to listen. The clip itself will tell the reader the tone of the President’s voice, his mood." He finds this approach resonates more than just a little quote. "Readers don’t get as excited as reporters do about news stories because they don’t see the original secret papers," Pizzo said. With the new technology, material can be scanned into a file and linked to the story. On a story like the flat tax, readers can be linked to dozens of Web sites on the topic.
Technologist Matt Brocchini, with the software powerhouse Oracle, agreed: "The fact that an individual can drill down and get behind the facade of the reporting, down to the real stuff, is definitely revolutionary. There is no question that that’s a revolution." Global Network Navigator’s Lisa Gansky uses the Internet as a means of backing up what she sees and hears from traditional news media: "If there’s a story that I’m suspicious of or I actually want to get more—I’m keen to get more detail—I do go on the Net." But woe to the news source in the 21st century who betrays that trust; it will be quickly replaced, she said. For Ed Christie, of SRI Consulting, today’s Internet is a starting point. He said that the Net is "not the end. It is simply a way to learn how we can do things once we do have these broadband networks, which are not going to be here in 2.3 years or 4.2 years." But once we have them, "there we go."
For journalist Gina Smith, all this talk about the glories of the Internet overstates the case for a decent, but not overwhelming, technology. She said...that communications and computers will affect news "a lot less than everybody thinks."
Every time a new medium appears, "the impulse among everyone is to assume how everything is going to change completely." Smith concede[s] that the Net is changing, with new developments such as real-time audio and video.
But the fact is, she said, most people do not have modems fast enough to make good use of the technology. Those 14.4 Kbps modems, which are in most computers now, are not nearly fast enough for a multimedia news product, and the quality of two-way video at 28.8 Kbps "is dreadful."
Christie agreed, saying: "You can get additional information on the World Wide Web. But most people aren’t willing to put up with "click and wait." Smith predicted it will be 10 years before two-way audio and video on the Net will "become real enough for us to exploit" in delivering news. It may take some time for the right set of skills to develop, as Christie said. Early TV, he said, was "a bunch of people who read the commercials like they used to on the radio, and it didn’t work. And it took a while to sort that out. And it’s going to take awhile to sort this out, too."
On the other hand, the Net is a great tool for reporters to use now for their research, Smith [says]. She also advise[s] TV and radio stations to "work on getting your personalities online" as a way to keep the audience and build new relationships. She compared the situation to the cable industry 20 years ago, and said magazines missed their opportunity. Why is it that CNN was created, and not Business Week Television, she asked. "Why not Sports Illustrated?" (After the discussion was taped, Sports Illustrated announced a partnership with CNN for a new sports cable channel, CNN-SI.)
Odyssey president, Nick Donatiello agreed, advising stations "to get some (online) experience, but don’t expect very much." Donatiello would like to see the new media enhance current news delivery. Rather than seeing online or other technologies replace TV, radio, or newspapers, Donatiello said existing outlets could ask themselves what new media can do to help remedy the problems that result in declining viewership and readership.
There is a tendency when discussing new methods of delivering news to focus almost exclusively on the Internet and its World Wide Web aspects. But participants in the discussion made it clear there are other technologies, some that show promise and others that have not shown much yet. CD-ROMs fall into the second category, said San Francisco State professor John Burks. As he looked over the new media, it was clear to him that using the word "pathetic" wasn’t an exaggeration.
The CD-ROM isn’t just clunky and hard to operate, Burks wrote, once you get it up and running, the content is "usually fourth-rate." For Don Roman of Pacific Telesis, the ultimate in news technology may well be the video equivalent of the Internet. Instead of providing just text and graphics, video also will be stored in servers, giving viewers many more choices of exploring the same topic. Roman noted that a traditional newscast has an editor who makes the decisions on which story will lead the newscast and which stories will be in each segment. Those brief items are different from a longer report, such as those shown on a PBS news program. And so, Roman ask[s]: "And why couldn’t you have both? If you had your news on a file server, you can go in and get the 30-second story or you can get the 5-minute story, depending on where your interests are."
Eventually, Roman said, broadcast news will be interactive, "or have the capability for being as interactive—in the sense of selecting what you want to see—as the Internet is, and not very much down the road from now." The end result, conceivably, is that by selecting items of interest, viewers could construct their own newscast. In order for that future to develop, however, it will cost billions of dollars to lay fiber cable, Smith said, adding it would "happen in a minute" if there were a "compelling application" justifying the expense.
Online technologies have the potential to deliver news and information to a very narrowly defined audience, and...that trend toward specialization is developing in existing media as well. Burks is working on a project with KGO-TV, San Francisco, sending out zoned broadcasts over cable, so that different communities would have different, more localized programming and ads. (The over-the-air KGO-TV signal stays the same everywhere.)
The same zoning technology also could make interactive entertainment TV possible, Burks said. Narrow segmentation of news "isn’t necessarily a bad thing," Semon said: "If the news is presented to a little bit different audiences because of the segmentation, does it really matter if it’s BET or Galavision or MTV? If the format gets an individual to watch because of an affinity group, but it’s the same news, we become better informed."
Brocchini noted that not long ago, he thought interactive TV would deliver the news. Now the World Wide Web is taking center stage. Brocchini said he would like to imagine that it will not matter which delivery system is used, that information will be delivered by whatever suits us—online, TV, paper, personal digital assistant (PDA), or whatever else is around.
Focusing on the technology of tomorrow’s news is so exciting, it is easy to overlook the other half of this equation—the customer. Who is the audience for these services? How will they react when these grand new developments come our way?
...The technological possibilities of the new news business will be wonderful even if, in the opinion of some, it will take a while to materialize. Researcher Armando Valdez noted that today, "news audiences are largely passive receptors of information that is gathered, packaged, and delivered by news professionals." In the future, he argues, audiences will be "active users" of information resources, picking and choosing on their own from the information-rich Web, or from Roman’s concept of video servers with news stories ready to go.
Other[s] [do] not agree. "You can lead an audience to a mouse, or keyboard, or big-screen TV with keyboard/remote, or whatever, but will they use it?" says Smith. Listen to Smith, and you get the idea that Kevin Costner’s "Field of Dreams" Iowa ballfield would have been overgrown with weeds.
Smith doesn’t care if they build it—she’s not coming: "I get home from work, I’m so exhausted. I’m lucky to pour a glass of Chardonnay and make it to the couch. And I don’t want to sit down and say: ‘All right. I want to see sports first, because I care about football. And no O.J. And now I want this and that.’ All these decisions take time. Most people don’t have the time to even think about the choice, much less..." As Gansky observed: "Remember, we are a culture in which people buy pre-fabricated term papers to get through college." Or as Christie put it, news "is passive. I go home. I turn it on. I watch it."
Americans are people of habit, and those who expect a quick change will be disappointed, he said: "You can’t change the habits of an audience of American people who are not used to dialing into a computer to get their news or choose sports or weather." Donatiello said that even if people get used to the many choices available to them, it won’t be "so they can get a fifth layer of detail on the flat tax," much as Pizzo would like. If used at all, it would be for entertainment, Donatiello said. Part of the problem with trying to build an on-line business now is that the demographics are "extremely bland," as Smith put it.
According to Smith, most of the 6 million Web users are "upper-middle class suburban white guys. Women, minorities, and anyone over age 50 barely show a presence." Nick Donatiello disagrees, saying that about 10 percent of American households are online and that women may make up 40 percent of online users.
As Valdez point[s] out: "Diversity may be sacrificed at the altar of new technology." He noted that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), part of the Commerce Department, found that affluent families, most of them white, comprise most of the households with computers. Overall, Valdez looked at the online crowd and saw another group. He said the audience for the new technology is "much more complex than we’d like to admit."
He describes the Internet community as "a hobby audience." But there are many people who "are not keyboard literate, are not likely to become keyboard literate, and don’t want to become keyboard literate for a while." It may disappoint the technologists, but sometimes the audience lags behind in terms of interest and "desire to do things that we would like them to do," Valdez said. Burks saw that there is yet another audience out there, the people who are between 13 and 21 now, who started out playing video games, and who will accept or even demand "steerability"—the ability to be comfortable with a myriad of choices and to pick from them.
The technologies have the power to forge a vastly different bond among readers and news providers. But [there are] different views of how that realignment might occur. For Pizzo, the capabilities of online publishing are a blessing. "I believe that this medium offers me an opportunity to begin restoring this profession’s credibility," he wrote.
The problem, Pizzo said, is that national journalists are covering more partisan and divisive issues and that both sides of an issue believe reporters are twisting facts, which also is a reflection of readers’ polarization. "Countering the trend has proved a problem, not just for print journalists, but broadcast outlets as well."
Editors cut print stories, but the problem is magnified for radio and television when precious transmission time means that even the most complicated story has to be rendered down to its most fundamental element, a process that can cause a gap to grow between reporter and the audience. Pizzo said: "Once readers have regained their trust of journalists they once again begin using the news (and the multimedia resources included in them) to make decisions on the issues that face the nation and world." He added: "Until that happens, journalists are just contributing to the noise of battle. I believe that online publishing holds the best promise for getting there." Gansky said she recognized that "there will he shakeouts in the understanding of what constitutes a trusted professional."...[S]he noted that the media for providing news are going to work synergistically, not separately.
Consumers will develop new habits, and will "begin to trust one medium and several voices in a medium for certain kinds of stories, depth, or, you know, minority angles, or local angles of what’s really happening in Bosnia from people who are online who have some identity there." From her own experience in the 1991 fires around Oakland, Gansky noted..."We found that information from authorities (i.e., police and firefighters) often was false, faulty, and out of date in the swirl of confusion created by many fires. We began to mistrust their information." What they did trust was communicating with neighbors on portable radios, and checking out the scene on motorbikes. For Gansky, the development of grass-roots news sources (scorched or otherwise) means that the sources of news will be far more diverse than today.
Brocchini sees advantages in the sheer mass of information developed by online participants, much as Gansky’s neighbors gathered it, but on a dramatically larger scale. He wrote: "In fact, I’d say the ‘mob journalism’ of USENET is often more reliable than much professional journalism. It’s harder to slip an error past many USENET communities than it would be to get the same thing by some magazine fact-checkers. The group is self-policing." However, as Brocchini well knows, it may take wading through dozens of USENET postings before the self-policing takes hold and accurate information is presented. Even then, it still may be hard to evaluate.
Pizzo took a different view, noting there is "an enormous amount of garbage out there." As he reads through news-like postings, he finds items that resemble news stories, "yet all the facts are wrong." People must become "more intelligent consumers of this product than they ever were before." As Viacom Cable’s Doug Semon pointed out, as everyone becomes a news provider, it will take some time for the public to pick out which sources it trusts. Or, as Ronald Reagan put it in another context: "Trust, but verify." In that environment, established organizations, whether network news or local stations, could "have a head start, but it will be incumbent on them to maintain this advantage."
After considering the pros and cons of the developing technologies and the effects on the audience, one large question remains: How will the news business evolve? Or, to put it another way, can...the professional journalist, be replaced by a string of ones and zeros?
The question is not that far-fetched. America Online, CompuServe, and a host of specialized online business services already allow customers to set up collection files based on key words or topics. These primitive "intelligent agents" search through the services to find all of the stories on a given topic. It is not that hard to imagine sending more advanced "infobuts" onto the Web, or some other computerized medium, to perform many of the same tasks, and come back with some long stories, some short stories, some foreign or some political stories, in whatever order the searcher wants, in other words, creating a computer-compiled newscast.
That is an extreme view, although Pizzo, Semon, and Valdez each suggested their own variations on that theme. As Semon put it: "If all this information is available electronically, then it would be relatively simple to write a computer program where you could specify what you wanted to know, and it could go find it for you."
Many [journalists]...however, [aren’t] that far apart in their projections about how the news business will evolve. For Brocchini, journalists will be packagers and producers and filters, who will use their judgment to compile the news because the audience does not want to be deluged with "a huge selection of unedited material." This filtering function may be more important than ever because of the glut of unreliable information sources, he said. Valdez said journalists will have a variety of roles: "repository and information resource; authenticators and archivists; information gatekeepers and brokers."
The most hopeful sign that, yes, there is a future, may have come from Semon, another of the technologists, who said: "I’m not sure that I’d want to read news that was written by somebody like me. I would prefer to leave that to people that are qualified to do that and have some experience."
Then again, there were predictions that the next generation of news may resemble what we have now, although the structure of the industry may change. When Roman’s future of file-server TV does come, he predicted: "You’re going to see a real diminished role for local TV stations, which I’m not sure is the message that local news directors want to hear." At that point, the mass audience for each of what we call channels will start to break down so that "a five rating will be fantastic," in a world of hundreds of channels, Roman said.
...Roman noted that in the 500-channel universe of file servers and declining market share, there will be less money for traditional news operations to spend on sets, graphics, satellite units, reporters, and writers. On the other hand, while the future might not be bright for TV broadcasters, Roman said, it will be "very bright" for TV news producers and journalists, who will provide the content for all of those channels.
The most common model cited by the panel was the old TV show, "Max Headroom," in which reporter Edison Carter of Network XXIII flew around the city, camera on his shoulder, reporting and shooting stories as they happened, while network moguls monitored the instant ratings. Brocchini suggested a system in which all these "news providers" feed their material into a larger network, and get paid according to how many people see it.
Burks, however, found a downside to a close link between individual provider and a service, because all that would be covered would be the hottest stories, with more important stories or even depressing stories (a tax increase, for example), left to less experienced reporters.
Working within today’s news structure, Burks said, journalism education might need to train reporters to be much more versatile than they are now. A reporter might have to write a wire-service version of a story to go online, a short piece for one database or news show, a longer version for another outlet, and perhaps a magazine article. Add the Max Headroom scenario, and Burks’ advice to students is: "Be ready, if not to do all those things, to think that way, to be multimediated when they walk out the door."
We are still far from that future, and the competitors to traditional news are still developing. For some, the road is rockier than for others.... Pizzo commented frequently on the problems being faced by online publications, like Web Review for which he wrote, trying to sell ads, but without the circulation figures used by print publications. (In late May, 1996,...Web Review suspended publication. It had enjoyed a relatively long life in cyberspace: nine months.)
Publisher Dale Dougherty said...that the advertiser-supported model wasn’t covering the costs of the editorial, design, production, and technical staffs. His epitaph for the magazine: "In the end, we cannot keep giving it away." The advertising approach wasn’t working, so Dougherty asked whether his 50,000 readers would pay $19.95 for a 6-month subscription. "You are voting on the future of the Web and what you will find there," Dougherty said. "Web Review is not alone in having these problems."
Pizzo said in an interview after the magazine closed that it is not true that publishing in cyberspace is cheaper than the paper product. His magazine spent $800,000 over its 9-month life for editors, research aides, Lexis Nexis, attorneys, and all of the other overhead that accompanies good journalism. Pizzo said it could be 5 years before the industry figured out a model to support an independent online publication. Until then, there must be a print companion or other affiliate bringing in the money, he added, predicting that eventually all of the best Internet content will be in "gated communities," online sites paid for by users. The free material will be "outside in the slums."
We started this discussion with the admonition that there were no right answers to the questions about how to react to, and go with the flow of, developments in technology. If anything, the discussion...showed that there is not one right and true path to Information Age enlightenment. There are several paths that you can take, each with the potential to get you to your destination.
One key point to bear in mind is that whatever new capabilities the technology may bring, there will be old skills that will be refined and new skills that will be developed. But the technology, as Semon observed, is only a benefit if the product being sent along it has value. That value is created by understanding the needs and habits of the audience, by establishing a level of trust with the audience, and by supplying information that is worthwhile.
As Valdez put it, whatever changes that news organizations have to implement to remake themselves for the future, they should do so "without losing sight of the vital role of news and information to a democratic nation and democratic institutions."
* Silicon Summit: Will Technology Affect the News?" was originally published by the News in the Next Century project of the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, with support. from The Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation.
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