Newsroom of the Future

I joined a group called the "Next Newsroom," a project out of Duke University that envisions what a future newsroom would look like. It's also looking at revamping the campus newspaper The Chronicle. Anyone who joins can post their thoughts about what newsrooms will look like in the future.

Here's what I had to say about "The Next Newsroom:"

I hope there are newsrooms in the future. There is a certain amount of optimism and faith involved in assuming that there will be. I don’t have to remind anyone familiar with media today that these are dark days in newspaper newsrooms and broadcast newsrooms.

I always assure my students that there will always be journalism in some form. We just don’t know what it will be yet. So maybe it’s best to assume that there will be future newsrooms in some form.

Perhaps future newsrooms won’t be a geographic place but a digital space. That’s what happening with hyperlocal media and with Internet news. I’m old-fashioned enough to think that there’s a loss if there’s no central gathering place for news gatherers but I guess that’s what the Internet has become.

Future journalists will do what many current journalists are doing: everything. They’ll write articles, blog, do multimedia and podcasts and whatever else fits in. I hope that there will still be a place for skilled trained journalists and editors who look over their shoulder. I know there’s a lot of wonderful stuff coming out of blogs and perhaps I truly am a dinosaur but I hope there’s a place for the balanced reporting, in-depth stories and investigative pieces that are the hallmark of good journalism.

If the future newsroom is staffed with future journalists then there’ll have to be a way to pay them. Maybe news organizations will all run on the NPR, non-profit model. Sure, NPR has had cutbacks too but their audience has grown while other news organizations’ audiences have shrunk. They must be doing something right.

Perhaps news organizations will find some way to make money from the Internet. There is widespread skepticism that Internet readers will pay for content but maybe they will. I know I was one of the few people paying for the Times archive so I would be one of those people. Whether there’s enough people like me, I’m not so sure. My few students who read the newspaper read it online. They pay for iTunes or at least some of them do. But the newspaper isn’t quite so fun and it’s worthless the next day.

I hope future newsrooms will find ways to reproduce traditional newsrooms’ best features: the shared ideas, the collegiality, the shared passion. If they can do that, it’s probably OK that there’s no way to gather around the coffee machine anymore.