Journalists in the ’90s saw tech coming miles away – and so can we

As Prof. Dan Kennedy has mentioned a number of times, people discussing the collaboration/combination/competition of/between journalism and technology like to frame their arguments as follows: “Newspapers never saw the Internet coming. It was earth-shattering; they had no idea what to do.”

Such was not the case.

A 1981 news report from KRON examines the birth of digital newspapers in San Francisco – which, I would like to note, remains the tech capital of the U.S. This report from 35 years ago presents some aspects of our modern digital journalistic landscape surprisingly accurately. For example, we have digital editions of newspapers today. Some are PDFs; others are interactive e-papers, like this one from the Boston Globe. However, these e-papers incorporate more than just text. They have photos and comics and advertisements. They are interactive and clickable. They have hover-over text. These papers are true multimedia efforts.

As expected, though, the report gets several things wrong. The journalists of 1981 thought of the news as though it could only exist in the format of the traditional newspaper. Today, we don’t care if news articles look the way they would look in a physical paper. We care about the content, not so much about how it’s delivered to us.

The final error the 1981 newscast makes is both egregious and tragic. Newspaper deliverypeople, as we have seen, are definitely nearly out of a job with the decline of printing.

In 1994, the people working at the intersection of technology and journalism had more of an idea of what was coming. The World Wide Web had been around for five years, and news was already undergoing rapid development. In a video called “The Tablet Newspaper: A Vision for the Future,” media organization Knight-Ridder had some ideas that were both fantastic and realistic:

• The individuals working there essentially predicted the iPad. An electronic tablet where many Americans could get their news fix? A reality in 2016.
• The interactive digital newspaper, too, has since materialized. I’ve already mentioned the Globe’s e-paper.
• According to the video, tablets would have a “clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper.” Today, we see iPads with retina displays, the highest-quality screen resolution on the market. The Kindle Paperwhite, too, was designed specifically to replicate the look and feel of a paper book.
• The rise of infographics. The video shows us an example of an interactive map of the former Yugoslavia, which is highly reminiscent of visual stories in the Washington Post and some maps and charticles that lend themselves to data-driven journalism in the New York Times Upshot section.
• The personal profile page. While I’ve yet to see a media company doing this, tech giants like Google (Google News), Apple (Apple News) and Facebook (Trending Topics) have been acting as selective aggregators, using algorithms to curate news to each user’s personal interests.

There were a handful of things that Knight-Ridder predicted only semi-accurately:

• Combining video and audio with written stories. In the Knight-Ridder model, the written article is king. Audio and video merely supplement it. Today, if video – or audio – and written article appear together on the same Web page, they’re not necessarily working together. With video (see: CBS), a video story and a written story may or may not use the same quotes, present the same amount of or perspective on information, etc. With audio (see: NPR), the written story may merely be a transcript of an audio story that aired on the radio earlier in the day.
• The idea behind clipping, saving and sharing articles. We basically do that today, but there’s no reason for the content to bear a resemblance to an actual newspaper clipping. I can convey information via a bit.ly link – that’s all I need.
• That the tablet can read stories aloud to its user. We see this everywhere in screen readers, a still-underdeveloped technology, which is fantastic for accessibility purposes. But the example of the woman listening to the newspaper in her car? If I were commuting and wanted to listen to the news, I would just put on NPR Morning Edition.

And, of course, there were many things the media professionals of 1994 got horribly wrong:

• The Knight-Ridder folks consistently underestimate humans’ ability to adapt to change. They assume that the new product needs to look exactly like a physical newspaper, or users would require a manual to understand it.
• The idea that people are committed to a particular newspaper or brand is completely outdated. No one cares anymore. They just want news. You go to one of the tech giants’ aggregators I mentioned earlier, and there will be multiple articles, even on a single topic, from the New York Times, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Mic, FOX News – the list goes on.
• “People like advertising.” People do not like advertising. Ad blockers were created for the express purpose of removing advertising from our everyday lives. If I, as a user, want to find a specific ad or coupon, I’ll visit websites like RetailMeNot; if I want classifieds, I’ll go to craigslist.
• Publications do not exist on electronic cards that you buy from kiosks. I truly don’t understand what the people at Knight-Ridder were thinking here. The Internet was alive and well; the video showed discussion of information superhighways. There was no reason to view the paper as a physical entity.

By 2005, media professionals had become frighteningly good at predicting the future of news. (Whether we’ve successfully done anything about it as journalists is a different question.) Despite the amusingly dystopian nature of the EPIC 2015 video put out by the Museum of Media History, most of the basic ideas it presents are undoubtedly extant.

Early in the video, the narrator tells us: “Journalism organizations cry foul. Google News is edited entirely by computers.” In fact, as tech giants like Google continue to develop algorithms that control how we see our news, journalism organizations continue to cry foul – and we continue to lose. Facebook, which changes its algorithm every few months (much to the chagrin of media outlets), came under fire multiple times this year for the way it’s handled its Trending Topics feature. The resolution: let Trending Topics be almost entirely automated. And with the advent of features like Instant Articles, Facebook becomes increasingly responsible for publication and distribution, forcing journalists to try to work with it rather than oppose it. Last week, we read a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review called “Facebook is eating the world” that summed this up rather nicely.

About halfway through the video, I laughed aloud at the prediction “Google and Amazon join forces, forming Googlezon.” Googlezon sounds ridiculous, but the principle behind it isn’t foreign. Advertising catered to the user based on their personal information and interests: this is how (again) Facebook makes money.

Googlezon is the hero/villain of the story. The folks at the Museum of Media History predict a dramatic lawsuit between the New York Times and Googlezon initiated by the Times, which sues the semi-mythical tech giant for violating copyright law. First of all, how would this work? Second of all, in this hypothetical scenario, the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and the justices decide in favor of Googlezon. Maybe in a few years, this could be the case, but top government officials are currently just as wary of tech people as tech people are of them.

Much of the video is centered around the prediction of a formula that is now commonplace: collect information about users, sell it to advertisers, and curate content and advertising to users through algorithms.

EPIC 2015 also makes a scary but accurate prediction of content being (at least presented as) narrow and sensational, which doesn’t seem too far off, given the prevalence of clickbait journalism, the listicle and media organizations like Mic. The hybrid of broadcasting and citizen users is another reality of today: it’s essentially Periscope, although Periscope is not really a social network in and of itself.

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Journalism is not dead. Journalism is not dying. Journalism may not make money for much longer – many predict it will soon become a completely nonprofit pursuit – but the fourth estate will not fade. As long as democratic society exists, it needs a functioning press. This class exists so we can study the development of digital journalism and make it work, not so we can feel fatalistic about our future careers. I leave you with an essay written by John Harris, editor-in-chief of POLITICO, called “Why Journalism,” and – hopefully – some feeling of inspiration and hope about the future of news.