It will be a dismal day when cost overruns force The Diamondback’s printing presses to come to a grinding halt and campus news is delivered solely via the World Wide Web.
No, the paper isn’t facing a financial catastrophe, but the days of being able to pour over articles printed in dark, black ink on creamy, white paper are sadly numbered. As we spend more of our lives online, print media is slowly stalking its way into obscurity. Last month, The Washington Post reported a 50 percent drop in its newspaper profits, an irreversible trend spurred by our acclimation to “on-demand” media, where we get what we want, when we want it.
And though we’ll one day be leaving the exciting era of newspaper barons behind, there will be a bizarre and beautiful future to look forward to at the wake. As the Internet matures, we’re increasingly able to unshackle news content from a specific medium and tailor the information we’re presented with through customizable news feeds.
The next 10 years present a picture even more peculiar. The computers comprising the Internet are, in essence, a gigantic distributed computing machine, and while individual computers may fail, the entire machine has an unfathomable calculation capacity and never turns off. We’ll soon have techniques powerful enough to harness the artificial learning ability of this machine to automatically filter and deliver content to users. Instead of reading through articles organized by a savvy editor on broadsheets, we’ll click through articles arranged by a sophisticated algorithm on websites.
Sound impossible?
It’s already happening.
Whenever you send a link to a friend on AIM or tag a photograph in Facebook, you’re teaching the aggregate network of the Internet how to pick out valuable content. When techniques to analyze these habits go online, we’ll start being served content attuned to our interests with uncanny precision.
As user-provided content becomes more prevalent and our ability to sift through the junk improves, corporations will inevitably shift focus toward these profitable media outlets. Many thought Rupert Murdoch was crazy for buying MySpace.com for $580 million, but he was ahead of the curve, as the website is a place where users willingly spend hours amid advertisements looking at cheap content. With more than 100 million blogs operating today, our appetites have slowly shifted from media produced by centralized companies operating for profit to a confederacy of individuals operating for pleasure.
Some even think that on-the-spot news will be reported for free in the future because we’ll be so interconnected: Witnesses of an event will simply have to blog about what they saw and their stories will be spliced together by an algorithm to create a reasonable account of the occurrence. Fortunately for journalists, algorithms can’t duplicate the tenacity and critical thinking required for true investigative reporting. The art of journalism has a place in the new century, but the business of journalism may not. The ability of journalists to lay history’s rough draft will always be an invaluable public resource even if print media is no longer a profitable path for piggybacking advertisements.
The industry will need to make a fundamental shift from the widely practiced media conglomerate model. The brightest beacon in a sea of sinking ships may be the nonprofit Poynter Institute-owned St. Petersburg Times, which has grown to have the largest circulation in Florida. Freedom from worrying about high profit margins allows the staff of the paper to focus on its mission to provide news as a public service to the people of Tampa, Fla. The formula works, as aside from maintaining consistent readership levels, the paper has won six Pulitzers since 1964.
With revenues shrinking every year, The Diamondback shows that even a paper written by students and read widely by the campus community isn’t immune to shifting societal norms. And though the paper will always have its detractors, it ceaselessly remains a civic commodity. We’ll soon need to start treating it as one.
Benjamin Johnson is a senior physics major. He can be reached at katsuo@umd.edu.
