We live in a world in which original journalism is a smaller and smaller component of a larger and larger media and communications system. When Vanity Fair named its fifty "leaders of the information age" in its annual look at "The New Establishment" last fall, only one leader -- Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief, Time Warner -- was a journalist working for a mainstream news organization.

 Journalism companies used to control the megaphone -- and therefore had a monopoly on who got heard. New technologies such as satellites, cable, fiber optics, and, of course, computers have destroyed that world forever.

 Some of what we hear about the future is hype. Two years ago everyone was busy touting the future of interactive television. Soon everyone would be ordering up movies on demand and enjoying the 500-channel universe. Then a new graphical browsing software called Mosaic suddenly made it fun to navigate the Internet. Now interactive TV trials have disappeared into technical and expense- sheet quagmires while hundreds of new "channels" are added to the World Wide Web every single day. Next up for a publicity blitz: the Internet through your cable television connection.

 The point is that while specific, short-term predictions may be wrong, it's a mistake to ignore the overall longer-term trends. "Take it as given that within five years, networked computers in the workplace and the home will compete on an equal footing with the existing news media as a routine source of news for over half the public in the industrialized world," writes Professor Russell Neuman of Tufts University, who is known for his careful scholarship. "Skeptical? OK, then make it ten years. We're not discussing the end point anymore, just the shape of the diffusion curve."

 Journalism faces a historic challenge to adapt to a new medium, whether people relate to it through a television screen, a computer monitor, or some new hybrid. All journalists -- even the most technophobic -- need to understand how digital communication systems are challenging both the business models and journalistic conventions we've inherited from other eras of technological innovation.

 Take, for example, our first journalistic stop on this tour -- The Boston Globe, which has rethought old notions of proprietary products. Instead of just taking their newspaper online, as so many have done, the Globe people have opened a gateway -- boston.com -- to their whole region. They convinced all the major television stations and museums in the city to join them as content partners, creating in the process a new media genre. Citizens can play, too, by voicing an opinion, or using the site's resources to help address community problems, or linking their home pages, or their organizations', to the main menu.

 The task facing any thoughtful journalist today, says Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of The New York Times, "is to take the brand we have today and to translate it for this new medium. Some of the parts will be shockingly familiar to all of us. Twenty and twenty-five years from now, other parts none of us can even imagine."

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