The Future of News
Asked to look into the future, we decided to focus on 10 and 30 years
ahead. For either, we determined, the questions we were asked seemed
largely irrelevant, focusing as they did on development tools and software.
"At a certain point, the device is a non-existent issue," noted team
member Laurence Bricker.

We instead operated on the assumption that digital devices would talk to
each other much more seamlessly than now, that people won't worry|
nearly as much about the device they have any more than we were worried
about how the water was delivered to the courtyard fountain or the type of
handset on your phone.

We did identify some overarching concepts that would hold tremendous
sway in our digital utopia (or dystopia), and help determine how news was
both conveyed and used, while being crucial for newspeople to consider in
gathering, packaging and disseminating news and information:

*) Convenience - someone gets what they want, when. You, as
newsperson, may not know the device the consumer is using or how
they'll use it, and, thus, will not know how your news product is
consumed. (Moving pictures? Audio? Sound? In what order? Etc.) Does
every news package have to be both linear and modular?

*) Portability - anything, anywhere, any time. No one tethered to a fixed
box. How will this change your concept of what you as newsperson
produce?

*) Manipulability - true customization, personalization, data-sifting. News
organizations' pre-set rubrics become much less relevant. Someone can
organize according to personal preference -- Tiger Woods, hormone
therapy, parenting information, Intel, whatever -- rather than pre-chosen
categories such as "national," "international," "health," and so on. Does
this mean the newsperson has to make the material so it can be sliced
and diced in any number of ways?

*) Ubiquitous Collection - A Webcam on every lamppost? Everyone (who
has a portable digital device that can record sound or images) becomes a
news gatherer? GPS data can be sorted and sifted to note immediate
movements of crowds or demographic trends? Will this obviate the need
for as many professional news gatherers? Do editors/producers become
sifters as much as analyzers?

*) Ubiquitous Dissemination - The counterpart to much of the above.
You, as news conveyor, may have much less control of what an audience
sees or hears of what you've done, or when. Artificial intelligence may play
a role, parsing and sending news according to patterns it identifies, to
users whose patterns it has identified. Will newspeople lose large
amounts of control over how what they produce is disseminated?

*) Ease of Use/Intuitive - Both for the news gatherers and users of the
devices that receive the news. Thus, all the above becomes easier. What
happens to camerapeople, producers, and so on, when anyone can
operate anything and technical expertise is less of an issue?

*) Legal/Rights Issues - Will the government control and perhaps even
sell access to "events" it "stages"? ("The Gulf War, Exclusively on CNN.")
If everyone is a news gatherer, and everyone can be in any piece of it at
any time, even as a micro-bit of data, what are the potential privacy and
legal issues?

We decided that one good way to penetrate the issues -- and convey our
future society through them -- would be to take on personas in a sort of
chain of people gathering, sifting, producing, editing and disseminating and
consuming news matter.

Here are the summations of those personas, all but one in the group
members' own hands. We presented them in the order in which we felt the
information might flow. News/data gatherer -->broker -->
editor/publisher/packager --> "re-packager/publisher" --> end consumer -->
game-module broker.

--Dorian Benkoil

GATHERER / Rex Sorgatz

You think you work with "Rex," a 29-year-old Web developer who
freelances from his day job at an Internet company. That is whom
accounts payable sends their checks to, anyway.

If you found out that Rex is really Marcy, a 15-year-old razor scooter
master who skips out of class to go "coding," you might question your
child labor ethics.

When "coding" -- a.k.a. "space hacking," "boarding," "tracking," "taping" --
first entered the labor force, it was a technical job. "Coders" would intently
listen to a police scanner and rev a van packed with a/v equipment to
crime scenes. Simply turn the encoding devices on, and they begin
collecting audio and video. As the equipment became more lightweight
and versatile, coding became an Everyman skill.

Or Everygirl.

Now, you wrap a headband around your barrettes, and it encodes three-
dimensional video and 10.2 channel audio. But, more importantly, it
indexes it all with metadata -- a coding structure that identifies all the
objects and sounds captured by the encoding device and stores it all in an
elaborate datagrid. Information includes latitude and longitude, names,
faces, objects, animals, weather, and sound.

Marcy scoots around the city all day, constantly encoding information,
which is instantly uploaded to the datagrid. If she encounters people, their
names and location are automatically stored. She has little idea what it's
all used for. Her income is meager but steady, punctuated with occasional
big-time captures. She gets a very small monthly check from the National
Weather Service, which uses her as one of millions of individualized
weather condition gatherers. That system has become so accurate that
golfers are able to get the wind speed difference from the tee to the cup.


She also gets a small stipend from large data aggregator companies.
Marcy doesn't know exactly what they do with this information, but she's
heard they sell it to other people, like private investigators who tap into it
to locate people in places at certain times.

There are thousands of Marcys across America, and probably soon to be
millions. If an ornithologist wants to know all the incidents of a certain
obscure swallow in a given region, the Marcys of the world have
contributed enough information to the datagrid for the scientist to draw
statistical conclusions.

Marcy has only the slightest inkling that journalists use the information
she encodes. When doing investigative work on a corrupt company, a
reporter looks up the CFO in datagrid and it spits back thousands of
pieces of audio and video and text -- all the way back to his high school
prom, which someone like Marcy "coded."

Actually, most of what appears on TV and in the newspaper now is based
upon the unedited "feed" that the Marcys of the world provide. Marcy is at
the bottom of the journalism food chain.

If someone told Marcy that there's a debate about the role of a journalist in
such a world, she'd shrug it off and skate away, capturing your name,
location, face, and conversation, as the scooter shreds off a dusty adieu.

BROKER / Laurence Bricker
My name is Lela Stringer. I consider myself an artist, a producer. I have a
small company of 15 people. We sift the news. On a good day I get to my
office and scan my usual sources for newsworthy captures. Everyone is
out there today with image capture systems, scanners, cameras, mini
discs. Except for the very hottest new captures, which are bought directly
by the big players, we pick what we think our clients will want to play. We
have some regulars like Tom Village who usually pick up a package from
me everyday.

I am always looking to expand my reach. Latch on to new successful
outlets. Find new story markets. Last week our editorial team was sifting
the newest offerings online, you know, the raw media captures of some
event somewhere in the world, anyway, we successfully negotiated an
exclusive on 15 different angles of a major terrorist attack. We got
immediate survivor interviews, 4 good angles on the event itself, there was
even footage from the responsible group.

I sometimes think these terrorists are just sophisticated business people
and are in it just for the resale value of their media stories. I negotiated 5%
with them. We were able to create a very cool experience story. Luckily,
all the live cams that are generally public domain, didn't get good stuff,
making my package so much more valuable. We had to pay a bit to
secure it all but it was worth it, the package we put together was picked
up by all the big players and many of the small guys. It's deals like that
that will build our reputation, and keep our business open.

I hate it when my clients mess with my packaging, the meaning can be
changed so easily. But I guess it is up to them. I try to put together
objective stories but we all know how hard that is to do. People want
controversy. I also think the live cams and private "right place, right time"
networks are going to make my business more difficult. The cameras are
there... waiting for the events to happen. News events can be anticipated
and predicted with some accuracy. Hubbard is lining up a global live cam
network that my bigger clients could subscribe to. They plan to be there
before the news happens. With so many cameras and devices in place to
capture events it could really pinch the "middle man" if the media sources
went right to the outlets.

People want experiential news packages and that isn't something that can
be mass produced. The news isn't just a pass through of raw data, it is the
filtering and packaging that add value, and that is why I have a job, 'cause I
can tell a story.

PUBLISHER / Dorian Benkoil
I'm Tom Village, 50, editor and publisher of a leftist journalistic
"publication" - actually more like what we used to call a "Web site,"
though I don't really care how you get my stuff, as long as you get it, and
what we do influences your thinking as a citizen, opinion leader, power
broker, whatever.

I still rely on people (not just machines and software) to gather the news,
information, images, sound, etc., and I prefer to deal with people and
organizations I know. I don't have to spend as much as I might have back
in the early 21st century on newsgathering, because now virtually anyone
can be a news gatherer for me. Because of my ideological bent, I'm
comfortable having groups like Greenpeace and other advocacy groups or
NGOs collect and send me whatever they've got from the places they go -
protests and rallies and international government conferences (the damn
WTO still exists), and so on. Everyone has so many gathering and
sending devices (handheld, cap-mounted, you name it) that it's often
possible for me to double-source a story just by searching and sifting.

The advocacy groups and NGOs are so happy to have the word (and
pictures and sound) out that I don't have to pay for much of what they send
me.

When I still need something I can't get through those sometimes reliable
sources, though, I'll call on a trusted news broker like Lela Stringer, who
gathers tons of material from all over the spectrum, but knows to offer me

only what I'll want. I've also learned from working with her that I can trust
her material, journalistically, and that it won't get me intro trouble.

I still have to pay a coterie of editors, writers and producers. In fact, more
than ever those people who have a honed, experienced eye, who can sift
tons of information and pick the salient parts, who know when to phone
someone to confirm a piece of reporting, who can analyze it all to put our
interpretation on it - those kinds of people are in many ways more valuable
to me now than the people who did leg work used to be. These editors
have to be not only sharp, but also fast. For in a world of instantaneous
information, the term "weekly" has ceased to have meaning. We'll put
anything out as soon as we've got the goods, because we know missing it
by even minutes means someone else will instead grab the audience, put
their spin on it, and we'll lose immediacy and thus the impact, the sway.

I also have a couple of wizards in what we used to call Computer Assisted
Reporting, who can crunch all kinds of government and organizational
databases, and sift them and find anomalies we can turn into stories: the
banks that red-line certain types of neighborhoods when giving loans
nationally, the police departments that hassle certain racial groups, and so on. I do have a gifted coder on staff - he spends some of his time
putting together background packages that can add depth and breadth to
our breaking news pieces - but, pinched for money as leftist publications
still are, I'm happy with mostly off-the shelf software solutions. I'd rather
spend my money elsewhere.

I still will happily pay for a certain kind of reporter, though, to do leg work.
We still need investigative types who can get out there, talk to people, be
tipped off, look through documents that others would find impenetrable,
find the kinds of things that the politicians, CEOs and other fat cats would
like to keep hidden. That's still a powerful way to afflict the comfortable.

RE -PUBLISHER / John Schott
I haven't used my name for years. I just go by my site, Hippocampus.
Identities have fused in some weird ways on the brink of the post-human.
It's 2012.

What can I tell you about the future? No much, except that I constantly
seem to be sitting: I get up from the screens to have a bowl of cereal, to
take a crap, to feed the cat. Otherwise, I'm constantly scanning and
pulling stuff down from my screens, comfortable in my hermit life bathed in
their blue glow.

A decade ago, the whole focus of news was on publishing. But today, for
me and most others, the real issue is "re-publishing." After a decade of
piping huge blasts of information into our computers, we've become more
and more concerned with using the thousands of streams now available.
Remember the mantra "data --> information --> knowledge --> wisdom"?

The last decade seemed preoccupied with data and information; today we
realize it's about knowledge and wisdom.

Re-publishers scan, sift and filter the inflow. We never really write anything
-- we're post-publishing. We call it "tying the tails together": We grab an
idea here, another there, then tie their tails together and pass them on.
We don't think in terms of newspapers, articles or raw datastreams: The
minimal unit of meaning is something like the idea. It's the new info-
semiotics. We sift and filter, then string ideas together in patterns that
make them intelligible, then pass them along to others. Looking at the
changes from your end of the arrow of history, you'd probably see it as
something like the oak that the acorn of blogging grew. But from this end,
it's way more interesting.

Think of me as a collagist, a cyberbricoleur. We're beyond the old news
hierarchies (professional journalists and their institutions) of the past;
today news is a kind of social collaboration. Finders and re-publishers
have become the favored meaning-makers. We keep the dialogue
humming. (In spades!) In fact, that's how I made my fortune: I created a
suite of software that allowed individuals to search-catalogue-excerpt-and
otherwise re-publish information. When everyone was focused on
multiplying information, I realized the real issue was what each of us will
actually do with it. I called the company Cut & Paste as an homage to
millennial postmodernism and the menu-driven logic of early computers.

Oh yeah, you wanted to know what Hippocampus meant. It's the part of
the brain in which we store memories that really mean something to us.
It's the ultimate bio-cognitive filter. It's about identifying, shaping and
storing things that we really value. And as you'll see, that's the future.

CONSUMER / Dale Peskin
Dale played a well-educated 42-year-old divorced, African-American
woman with two children. She found that she often learned of news events
relevant to her through her circle of friends and family, who would beep or
buzz her, and then on that same device she was able to quickly tap in and
get whatever additional info she wanted or needed to flesh out her
understanding of the news. She was fed the news and information she
wanted, when she wanted it.

GAME-MOD BROKER / Greg Daigle
My Persona for 2012:
My name is Jeff Russell. I'm 27. I work as an online game mod broker,
putting out my own press releases. And today I have something really hot.

I broker topical game mods for the Sims series. Right now I'm commuting
to work, and I'm excited because I just negotiated a game mod recapping
all news broadcasts, CDC alerts and pathology 3D interactives describing
the Brazilian Anthrax outbreak of 2010. It's going to be a new mod for the
Sims South America game.

Just five minutes ago I clinched the deal with Activision. This is hot news
in the $40B online gaming industry. So I pulled my DEKA Stirling hybrid
vehicle over and I'm uplinking via OnStar a brief text of the breaking news
with some MP4 video clips from my car's hard-drive to Gamesutra's news
bureau. I'm trying to negotiate links to three archived articles from the CDC
recalling the outbreak and its terrible mortality rate.

Looks like the news director at Gamesutra has offered to pay me an 8
point cut of the micropayment viewers. Sweet. I have another TimeWarner
IM coming in. It's from the CDC. The price is good on two of the articles,
but they're asking for a 6 point cut on their Pulitzer Prize winning article. I
think I'll substitute the University of Minnesota's 2011 bioethics report on
the outbreak in it's place ... they're a cheaper source AND great quality!

I believe ... YES! They've accepted it just in time for the next ten minute
news cycle. Now I watch the report on my PS5 IP phone. And there it is!
Anna-Dan-Ova, the news avatar for retired anchor Dan Rather is reporting it now. Damn, the logo on the breast pocket of his coat reads Nvidia. That
means that I have an audience of less than 10K, probably gamers for the
most part. Wait ... it just changed to Taco Bell! BINGO! That's 5 Million
eyeballs. That means ABC.com's Nielsen-bot will automatically pick it up
in the next news cycle at a 10 point share! I'm really on a roll today.