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November/December 1999 | Contents
voices: the future by Bill Wilt
If. If the preeminent institutions of journalists, the newspapers, massively and more rapidly expand their efforts on the Internet to become the hub - the trusted, responsible, fiduciary, quality-controlled hub - of all information, all the time - the hub through which the information component of everything in their community passes (size, color, construction, price/ value/cost, shipping date, picture, resumes, transactions, city council votes, laws, rules, regulations, hearing dates, administrative actions). The hub through which people in their communities can communicate and conduct commerce. Via any and all manner of devices and modalities. And actually provide the content - deliver it, push it out there, individualized, tailored, "The Daily You" as well as "The Daily Me" - by all and to all those receipt and delivery modalities. Newspaper staffs would have to double, maybe more than quadruple, through hires and the formation of new business relationships. Substantial amounts of floor-space, new or once occupied by printing presses, reel-rooms, rolls of paper and tanks of ink, would be shared with, or filled by, redundant disk-farms of databases and powerful, maybe even mainframe, computer servers, racks and racks and racks of rapid-access RAM for the indices, searching software and opening "pages," network routing and switching computers, all backed up by natural-gas-fueled mini-electric generators to assure non-stop electrical power. And air-conditioning and Halon systems. I say hubs because the image fits - that of a wagon wheel with a robust center, with radiating spokes, keeping the felloes, the interconnected sectors of the circle of life, linked and in position, all shrunk-fit together by the human-forged force of the iron tire, like the forces of nature that bind our lives together in every community. And if you want to map the image of a Web site home page to this wagon wheel, call it the hubcap, a highly utilitarian, sometimes ornate, means to keep the muck out of the axle-grease. You can figuratively traverse any spoke, through the hub, and get to any other felloe; you can circumnavigate the wheel without once passing through the hub - like e-mail and Web sites and cellular and geosynchronous satellites and tiny or huge ISPs. And it's all still accessible from the hub. The need for speed in taking this on? Because anyone can become an information provider. And they are. We all know that now, though we didn't six or so years ago when Mosaic and HTTP combined and hit the old ARPAnet. Banks are becoming cyber-mall owners, insurers, financial advisers, and stockbrokers. Cable-casters are becoming stock-exchange owners, as broadcasters have already become print newspapers-on-the-Web (text and graphics, still photos, audio and video clips). Grocers could become wellness-care purveyors. Electric companies, railroads, oil and gas pipeline companies — all with rights-of-way and infrastructure for stringing fiber-optic cable — are becoming /can/have become all of the above. (I leave television out of the mix, for now, because the bandwidth for on-demand video and the tools to manipulate it aren't quite yet upon us — ubiquitous, redundant, inexpensive arrays of disks built into a computer next to, in, on, or under the TV set that will allow every set-owner to become his or her own in-total-control station-manager, re cording and storing content off the cable or out of the "radio-magnetic spectrum" for later viewing as they choose as we can now do with text and still images [and video and audio "clips" and animated presentations, to be sure — but not a weekend's or an evening's worth of sound and moving pictures]. Maybe in five years, maybe two. But broadcasters are partly ready with their own Web operations — though probably not ready to fill the huge demand for content.) Why "all" information? Think of what comprises any traditional newspaper reporter's (or ad salesperson's) beat (or territory). The names, the places, the biographies, the relationships, the buildings, the roads, paths, pipes, tunnels, the attributes, the habits - all the stuff that existed, exists or will exist as a who, a what, a when, a where, in time and physical space, that taken all together then provide some access to figuring out the how. The need is to populate and link and relate this omnium gatherum of information so it's available when - and whenever and however - not merely in response to some unusual event — readers and advertisers need it. Journalists could be reporting, photographing, taping (video and audio), writing, and editing until our collective wrists seized up in tenosynovisitic spasm. Journalists haven't begun to mine the richness and variety of information needed to provide an adequate picture of how our public schools are doing, of how our town, city, state, and national legislatures, executive branches, and judiciaries are doing - have hardly begun to link all the words, pictures, drawings, and ads ever printed in the paper, from its founding day, to link my calendar with my wife's, son's and daughter's calendar with our refrigerator and pantry and weekly meal plan, the CDC, Tufts Nutrition Center, and the newspaper's own collection of thousands and thousands of recipes - and linked with the supply of Reggiano Parmesan in Parma/Reggio Emilia and Pecorino Romano around Rome. With a buying club, a computerized grocery co-op, we could order our own humongous wheels of cheese, import them, and divvy them up ourselves. And never mind food! With a computerized money co-op, members could be lending their own cash. What's to stop newspapers from becoming banks, the hub for the exchange of money for goods and services advertised in their print and electronic pages? Why "everyone"? Think of it as altruism or think of it as enlightened self-interest. Imagine how it would be if newspapers, in this all-digital world, were a digital presence in every classroom and home in the nation, helping to train, and as a resource for the training of, children in the joys and delights of careful observation, of accurate calculation, of the precise and entertaining use of their own and other language(s), of full, capable, responsible self-expression, dialogue, and participation in the life of the community. What about "taxonomy triumphant"? With all of this information from everywhere, about everything, in all kinds of forms, how're people going to get at it, make sense of it when they get it? It must be organized. Standardized. Naming schemes are required for both humans and computers to successfully deal with, relate, and relate to, this "all." Can't do it without taxonomy. "Editors wanted, librarian and RDBMS (relational database management systems) skills a plus." Think of how standardizing ETAION SHRDLU on a keyboard made it easy for Linotype operators to move around the country. Of how QWERTY (or ASERTY overseas) keyboards make typing skills portable (if not optimized for the operator or the language, but for an obsolete mechanical device with multiple flying metal bars converging on one narrow slot). Of how agreeing on which characters we should represent with the 128 unique combinations of seven binary digits (USASCII) enabled us to move text around electronically - and remember how, because we only agreed on what seven bits'-worth would be, and not eight bits'-worth (an additional 128 characters - 256 characters, total), we have all kinds of problems with "curly quotes," em-dashes, en-dashes, and other useful typographical characters in our cross-platform documents and e-mail even today. And finally, what about "trusted, responsible, fiduciary, quality-controlled" information? Newspapers have an historical and unique role in this nation. Newspapers helped get the Revolution going, got an early write-up in the Bill of Rights, disseminated and informed the Constitutional debates. And, however belatedly or sometimes unwillingly, newspapers (and magazines) do sometimes "furnish that check on government which no Constitution has ever been able to provide," as it's chiseled in marble in the Chicago Tribune's lofty lobby. No other "institution developed by modern civilization," as the Trib's McCormick (no bashfulness there) called the newspaper, has the opportunity, and sits in the natural intermediary position, to be the trusted organizer and sense-maker and conduit of "all" information between government and citizen, citizen and government, business and citizen, business and government, citizen and business . . . But this trusted middleman, this fiduciary role - it's only an opportunity - one that started to slip away when the high-profile assassination of President Kennedy was not solved. Zippergate re-framed that issue for me this year with heightened contrast: Precious (but renewable) bodily fluids spilled; brain tissue (non-renewable) blasted away. Sex, lies, and videotape; murder(s), lies and 8-mm film. I asked a stranger in a hotel elevator - he'd said "Good morning," as I was thinking of this as a newspaper fiduciary thing - "Is who killed President Kennedy still an issue for you?" (I checked first to see if his hair was gray enough to be likely to remember the event.) He turned and looked me in the face, I guess deciding whether to respond to the out-of-nowhere question, then nodded slowly and said, "Yes. It is. I think it's still an open issue for many people." As is the future of newspapers in this all-digital world.
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The good
news is that journalism has a really great future in this all-digital end of
the information age, this new age of relationships, of taxonomy triumphant,
of the bottomless, truly bottomless news- (and advertising-) hole. 