If we have learned nothing else in this summer of Monica Lewinsky headlines, CNN retractions and the rise of "citizen-reporters" on the Internet, it is that journalism is undergoing tremendous change.
Cable television and computer technology have obliterated traditional news cycles and leave many wondering whether accuracy -- the first rule of journalism -- is about to be lost in cyberspace.
In cities nationwide, daily newspapers continue to close, eliminating the competition that inspires vigorous coverage of the news. With only one newspaper in town, some owners -- preoccupied with the bottom line -- can more easily reduce their commitment to excellence in journalism in order to bolster their profit margins.
Given that environment, editors and educators say, it's important that journalists put their new tools to good use. "We have technological advances that are enormously accelerating the speed of communication and the volume of information available to human beings," said Eugene Patterson, former editor of the St. Petersburg Times. "But what that means is that it's going to be all the more demanding on journalists that we increase our capacity to reach the isles of meaning in this sea of words."
This rapidly changing news media landscape is very much on the minds of the 2,000 members of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication who are in Baltimore today for the opening of their annual convention, said Steve Lacy, president of the group.
During the next four days at the Sheraton Inner Harbor and Hyatt Regency Hotels, hundreds of papers will be read and panels convened. The convention's major round-table discussion tomorrow is titled "Communication in the Public Interest. Which Publics? Whose Interests?" News media commentator Hodding Carter III will explore the meanings of "public" in his keynote address today.
If there is one point of consensus among the two dozen educators and editors contacted for this article it is that journalists will not disappear. But, depending upon how you define the term and to which futurist scenario you subscribe, their role could be greatly changed.
The driving force behind much of the change is "convergence" -- computer technology and the Internet converging with television, radio and print in ways that can make for new forms of communication.
In some ways, one mutation of the reporter's role is already starting to look more like online gossip Matt Drudge than investigative reporter and editor Bob Woodward. One of the ways that Drudge -- who says his Web site gets 8 million "hits" a month and who appears weekly on the Fox News Channel -- defines himself as a "citizen-reporter" is in not having gone to journalism school or, as he puts it, "not having the credentials." Nor does anyone edit what Drudge includes in "The Drudge Report." He instantly publishes anything he wants by putting it on his Web site.
'It's not just Drudge'
"I think this is a tremendous problem, and it's not just Drudge," said Jack Nelson, the Los Angeles Times' chief Washington correspondent. "There are others on the Internet, too. And they put this information out there, and a lot of it is bad information. But you can't ignore it. And sometimes, because of competitive pressures and other factors, it gets picked up by the mainstream media. The problem is that there are no editors, no filters on this information. And the situation is getting worse."
Stu Wilk, managing editor of the Dallas Morning News, said: "Print journalists, who have always had the luxury of time -- at least compared to our brothers and sisters in television -- are already experiencing the thrills and spills of instant journalism, because with Web sites we have the same immediacy that TV has.
"I think that's going to intensify as the Internet and newspapers and cable TV outlets -- a la Chicago-land [the Chicago Tribune's 24-hour cable news channel] -- become more common. I think also that the distinction between a print journalist and a broadcast journalist is eventually going to disappear."
Wilk said his newspaper and its owner's television stations in the Southwest will team to launch a 24-hour cable channel, TXCN, in January.
"That's convergence," said Douglas Gomery, who writes "The Economics of Television" column for American Journalism Review. "The print reporters for the paper will also be working for the cable channel and the Web site, packaging and repackaging the same information."
Broader education
The larger journalism schools are already responding to the new media reality.
"Students at Maryland are now learning to do more than one medium -- they have to," said Reese Cleghorn, dean of the University of Maryland's College of Journalism. "You can still have a clear pathway in print journalism for newspapers and magazines, for example, but now you have to learn to work online, too."
Maurine Beasley, a College Park professor and former AEJMC president, spent last week in Scotland at the International Association for Media and Communication convention, where she says she heard a lot about convergence, computerization and the corporatization of journalism.
"In one scenario that was advanced, the individual journalist will become perhaps less important than he or she is now, and there will be more emphasis in journalism schools in training people to be electronic gatekeepers and information gurus," she said.
"It would lead to fewer opportunities for reporters to have the latitude to go out and spend a great deal of time generating information on their own. Instead, their function will become more one of repackaging information and analyzing it via electronic means," she said.
Frank Biocca, Ameritech professor of telecommunication at Michigan State University and author of "Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality," says the shift from the traditional model of a reporter gathering information to the notion of an "information manager" plugged in and receiving data from a number of electronic information streams is under way.
In fact, that is mainly what Drudge does on his Web site. He became famous by publishing the information that would have appeared in the article on Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton that Newsweek wouldn't publish.
The most radical vision of the future replaces reporters and television news photographers altogether with what Biocca describes as "sensing technologies."
One such form is the camera that offers "full 360-degree film technology," Biocca said. The idea is that a number of cameras will be planted in "news environments," such as a battlefield or forest fire, giving viewers multiple viewpoints simultaneously via high-definition television and a "real sense that you are there," in Biocca's words.
The danger of such reporting, many newspaper editors believe, is that it can lead to "stenographic" reporting, without the interpretation, analysis and scrutiny that experienced journalists bring to their stories.
The government is already creating such "Truman Show"-like environments with cameras and other sensing technologies, Biocca said. A very basic version can be found in downtown Baltimore, where police have planted video cameras to deter criminals around Lexington Market.
Virtually everyone contacted for this article cautioned against future-speak, citing those who said in the early 1990s that newspapers were soon going to be replaced by electronic tablets into which consumers could download information.
But no matter how conservative or radical their view of the future is, most agree on two things: The biggest and most immediate changes are going to be in the delivery systems -- the wires, satellite signals and other ways that news comes into our homes. And, more important, the salvation or ruin of journalism is going to come down to the men and women sitting in the newsroom analyzing, selecting and interpreting all that data from all those new sources.
Left to the forces of convergence and corporate imperatives, the seats could be filled by the likes of Matt Drudge. When asked whether hiring Drudge gave him any pause, Fox News CEO Roger Ailes said, "No, I didn't have to think long and hard about it. I watched [cable channel] MSNBC spend $200 million and get into bed with Bill Gates trying to figure out how to marry the Internet to television. And I just went out and hired the first star of the Internet."
Higher hopes
But Patterson and others have higher hopes for the journalists who will serve as gatekeepers in the future.
"I hope we use this great technology with good purpose for scrupulous and honest reporting and editing," said Ed Guthman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and former national editor at the Los Angeles Times and former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial page.
"The technology is important. You have to keep the curriculum abreast. But I am more concerned that we educate students to write, to report, to think, to be ethical, to be accurate. If we do that, journalism will continue to serve a democratic society," said Guthman, who teaches at the University of Southern California.
Said Patterson: "If I were a teacher, I would tell journalism students they have a much greater, not a lesser, challenge to use the written word to convey meaning than we do today.
"The written word doesn't necessarily have to be on paper. It can be delivered over radio, television, or computer screen, along cable wires, telephone wires or bounced off satellites. But, see, that doesn't matter, how the information gets to people.
"The point is: What information do they need? How do you select it, identify it, present it within the time frame that a human being can absorb it each day and with enough explanation and analysis that they can act on it in ordering their own lives?
"I don't despair for our future. Will the journalists of tomorrow be doing their jobs as we do today? No, they're going to have to do it better, and I believe they will."
Pub Date: 8/05/98