John Mahaffie

I attended a set of panel discussions last week on the topic “Who pays for the news?” The event was put on by the New America Foundation, a left-side policy think tank. They do a nice job of bringing interesting people into the room on the issues of the day.

As a futurist, I loosely filed this event in my mind as “the future of news”. But in fact, it wasn’t about that. The overall message of the morning was about shoring up the news business as we know it, not about the future form that business will take. There was an air of lamentation in the room, and in some cases, denial. It was standard to say “I really love my morning paper—in print!” Much of the discussion was founded on the belief that the news business, as we know it, is essential to a free society.

So what went wrong in this discussion? While everyone acknowledged that things have changed for the news business, they didn’t go the extra step of accepting that change and envisioning what’s next. They stayed in a defensive crouch. They boiled the profound change down to its financial elements—the business model no longer works. But they didn’t look with a clear eye at the other big forces at play. [A lone voice among the panelists, Maxine Teller, of MiXTMedia Strategies, did do this.]

The New America panelists were in “historic preservation” mode, they wanted to fix the system as we know it, rather than recognize profound change, and chart a new course for the news business. I see the same thing in much of the wider discussion about this that turning up online and in print.

But we don’t get to keep the system as we know it. We have to recognize that the world of news and information is being transformed. Digital technology is for the traditional media what Clayton Christensen calls a disruptive technology. That means it comes along, does some of what the old technology could do better and cheaper, and typically pushes the old ways into decline. The disruptor is rarely if ever a perfect substitute for the old technology—it won’t do everything better, and it may do some things worse. That is where our fear lies with the sweeping change hitting news and journalism.

The traditionally-minded, and I confess to being one of them, have to recognize some changes in the system, including:

Who discovers/edits/shapes/contextualizes our information
The divide (apparent or real) between commercial and non-commercial information
What is true, objective, etc. vs. what is shaped by an agenda, and, more importantly, what we do about that as consumers of information
Timing/time, when something arrives in the news, (i.e. is published) it’s supposed to be a “truth”. It’s now possible for anyone to “publish” anything. So now we have to accumulate information, weigh its validity, and/or wait for confirmation from other messages. “Published” can no longer equate to “true” (if ever it should have).
Coverage—how we are sure that information comes to light that should, with a question of whose “beat” is it, versus depending on “crowd-sourcing” for our news—millions of people, anywhere and everywhere, become the beat reporters, sharing information though social networks.

Those are some of the questions we need to explore much more as we look at the future of news. I will take some of them up in future “Future of news” posts here.

The news business and its key stakeholders, the public, need to take a fresh, well-rounded look at the future possibilities. Scenarios of a 10- or 20-year future, for example, could let us see some ways that news and information would get to people in the era beyond the news business as we know it. Exploring those possibilities could certainly be reassuring—and we seem to need that right now. But it will also allow public policy to shape what it needs to shape, and business to find its new pathways through the digital world and find ways to serve a need and make money too.

Image: wili_hybrid, via Flickr, creative commons license

Mind the Gap My daily newspaper is shrinking before my eyes. We’re entering a gap—the kind of gap that is common in changing systems—where the new (digital news) is not ready as the old (newspapers) fades away.

Print news is failing faster than digital news media can become adequate for our needs as a society. It’s not that online news is no good, and that print news is best. It is just that digital news is not fully-developed economically or institutionally. Digital “news” is still dominated by web sites and blogs that simply link to the offerings of the traditional media. They are not doing their own reporting, and meanwhile the print media are radically cutting back on reporting.

People see enormous life and vitality in online media, news websites, and news blogs. But in addition to the low level of reporting, most digital media are also not yet sustainable as businesses—the online news media have not proven themselves economically. Can they survive if the traditional media fails? What will they do if they can no longer tap traditional media?

We’ll probably get there—I expect to enjoy much more, higher-quality, online news before too long. But in this example, as in so many others, there is a lag between the decline or failure of established things, and the adequacy of what replaces them.

Other examples of historic and current gaps:

Manufacturing economies—dependent on a manufacturing base that has moved away, and with inadequate post-industrial economies to maintain employment and income, especially for the working classes.

Personal telephony—there was a lag in building secure, locatable, reliable mobile services comparable to landlines. Most important in this lag was the ability for emergency services to know where you called from if the call came from a mobile phone.

Letter writing—the art of letter writing faded away before we had embraced email and more current social media as ways to stay in touch, person to person. (Though for historians, the new forms of personal correspondence will likely prove inadequate.)

Physical fitness—our lives became substantially sedentary in the industrial and post-industrial era, and we’ve had to scramble to find ways to add back physical activity. Muscle work, which we once were paid to do, we now pay for in gym memberships.

What can futurists do about these gaps? We have several ways we can be valuable:

Anticipate the change—the end or decline of an established system. In that we may help the cause by inspiring more people to think about, and plan for the change. This could shorten or eliminate the gap, and might help some old businesses make a successful transition to the new, rather than failing as others come up with the new business models.
Envision what comes next, and get more people on board giving it concrete, serious thought. One thing that often happens is that people resist the change in ways that slow our advance to whatever comes next. By helping people envision a successful future, we are also likely to shorten the gap between old and new, and to smooth the way, reduce the losses and inefficiencies in the changeover.

The awful economic crisis we’re experiencing now will accelerate the decline of a lot of things that were probably going to decline anyway, and in others force change where change needed to happen. With luck and with careful, futures-informed work, some of this can be “creative destruction”. In other words, good new things can come from the destruction of some systems. But that’s not an automatic process, we have to get to work on it.

Image: Marcin Wichary, via Flickr, cc license

The future of news 1: We need better foresight

Mind the gaps