George Jetson, Media Critic?
Academics, media experts, industry insiders and people called "Futurists" were all asked to look into their crystal balls and predict the media future.
They're together now at the "Envisioning the Newspaper 2020" conference in Amsterdam – no doubt enjoying a Royale With Cheese or two – and presenting their predictions. But you, dear reader with a laptop or at your desk, can find out what they think here.
I took a look at some of the prognostications, and culled them down to a few. You can find some more here.
The winner in the category of Tech Garble and Stating of the Obvious is Sweden's Robert Picard:
If newspaper companies are to survive and prosper in this new environment, managers of firms will need to engage in strategic planning and implementation that builds upon existing capabilities and uses existing skills, knowledge and capacity to improve existing papers and introduce new products that provide access to parts of the public not well served today.The winner of the George Jetson Award for Newspaper Gadgetry? Moritz Wuttke of China.
The printed newspaper will get smaller and become mostly free. New technology and combination probably with mobile phones will make even the printed newspaper much more interactive than today. Low voltage e-paper or other paper-replacing foldable screens will be available to offer an alternative to the paper version, but very little interactive or cost efficient in regards to information retrieval.Low voltage e-paper? In a dozen years? Really, Moritz?
Then the winner in the category of But I Thought You Were A Futurist goes to Australian Richard Watson, who predicted:
Indeed, the more that life becomes globalised, digital and virtual, the more, I would argue, people will seek out products like newspapers that slow things down a little and tell us what's important and what's not, especially at a local level. And let's also not forget that physical newspapers, like books, are superb examples of industrial design, which, if invented today, would be greeted as a miracle innovation. They don't need power, there's no screen glare, they don't crash and when you're finished with them they can be safety recycled.As for me, I'll go with Roger Black. His thoughts?
Forget the Internet. It's not the enemy. (Indeed the Internet will ultimately save the newspaper). Readers don't read newspapers not just because they get their news online, but because they find them boring. There are major societal changes involved. Journalists are still working in a tradition that began with the young democracy.I also like what Michael Raynor had to say.
The most successful newspapers of the last decade launched Internet businesses that behaved as strategic options for the core newspaper franchises. Similarly, the most successful papers of the next decade are likely to be those that continue to launch new ventures not as replacements for the paper, or as catalysts for its imminent transformation, but instead as options on future shifts in strategy in response to changes that today can only be dimly imagined.It's reassuring to see that the Big Brains can barely agree on basic predictions of where newspapers are headed. This writer thought he was one of the few fumbling about in the dark. (That was before I heard of 'low voltage e-paper,' though.)
Regardless of where we end up, it's going to be bumpy. And there's going to be a lot of wrong turns. Will there be nothing but free tabloid handheld newspapers competing for your attention? Will newspapers just go all-out explicitly partisan? Will there end up being print hybrids of the New York Times and The Onion? You can't have trial and error without a lot of trying -- and failing. And these guys, with varying degrees of realism (as far as I'm concerned), are certainly trying.