"We don't want to throw away the 300 years' experience we've had in newspaper publishing. We want to build on that," says Roger Fidler of Knight-Ridder's Information Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, one of the two most prestigious research labs; the other is at MIT.

Fidler operates on the "fundamental believe that to be successful with the general consumer market the product will have to be portable; it will have to be very easy to use, ideally no more complicated than turning a page in a newspaper or changing channels. and we think it's got to be cheap."

His solution (see "Future Tense," CJR, November/December 1993) is an electronic newspaper that can be downloaded into a portable computer "tablet" about the size and shape of a pad of notebook paper.

While they're waiting for someone to develop the hardware, Fidler and his team are working on the software. Their electronic newspaper would look a lot like a conventional newspaper with headlines and abstracts providing what Fidler calls a "bridge of familiarity" to help readers make their choices.

A reader can navigate the paper several ways -- page by page like a regular paper, or section by section, with each section-front providing a summary of what's inside. The prototype also uses such by-now familiar multimedia tricks as still pictures that turn into video clips when you point to them and stories that provide entrance points to related or previous stories.

And there are ads. "We like ads. People like ads," says Teresa Martin, the lab's information manager.

"Part of our mission is to get advertisers to realize we are not stuck in the industrial age. We are moving into the information age aggressively," Fidler says. "We still have the chance of becoming the predominant news medium of the twenty-first century."

According to Fidler, Knight-Ridder plans to have an electronic version of one of its existing papers up and running by 1995.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, rather than trying to design a specific product, researchers are working on a range of devices and programs that change the way people collect and read news. In February 1993, a consortium of twenty-one companies, including Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Times Mirror, and Hearst agreed to invest about $ 2 million a year in MIT's News in the Future research project, directed by Walter Bender. Benders job is to take the sometimes arcane work of fellow researchers in areas like pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, and figure out how it can be used in the news business.

"The impact this technology's going to have on news in the future isn't going to manifest itself in a gadget," Bender says. "Rather it's going to manifest itself in an architecture. And the architecture is going to do three things. It's going to change our concept of timeliness. It's going to change our concept of convenience. And it's going to change our concept of relevancy. In order to do those three things, we need to understand the individual."

According to this vision, readers will receive information from dozens or hundreds of sources -- newspapers, news services, Internet news groups, professional publications. To keep from being buried under the sheer mass of information, people will employ "intelligent agents," computer programs designed to sort through all that information and bring back only the stories they are likely to want to read. For example, every morning, Bender's computer puts together a newspaper for him he calls The Bender Bugle.

"I'm a lot more interested in bicycles than The New York Times editors are. The Bender Bugle has every ad for a bicycle that appears on The Internet. But I don't get any fashion news," Bender adds.

How well this approach works will depend on how well the MIT researchers succeed in designing intelligent agents that understand what stories are about, at least enough so that they can make educated guesses that if you're interested in stock market news you might also want to read about SEC regulations. These agents must be able to learn as they go, watching what you read and refining the selection process a little every day. What they don't do -- yet -- is evaluate the information they process for accuracy and bias, the way a trained editor does.

By removing journalists from the mix and allowing people to go straight to the source, Carl Hausman, president of the Center for Media in the Public Interest, points out, you run the risks created by bulletin board systems and news groups today. There's simply not much accountability.

"A lot of this information is anonymous. Some of this stuff is crazy. You have no idea where it came from. If I read it in The New York Times, I know it's reputable. At least they have something at stake," Hausman says. Moreover, he argues, even if the facts people get over the wire are correct, readers still need help interpreting those facts. Journalists develop "crap detectors," and learn to examine information for hidden agendas and to put new in perspective. "I don't think most people are trained to do that. And they shouldn't have to," Hausman says.

It seems likely that readers in the future will be offered both kinds of electronic news -- newspapers with what Fidler calls "branded identities," and information retrievers that search a whole range of sources which may or may not be reliable.

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