John V. Pavlik, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, The Department of Journalism and Media Studies
SCILS, Rutgers University

jpavlik@rci.rutgers.edu

Throughout history, journalism and technology have traveled paths often intertwined. New technologies have often burst upon society and journalism has sometimes embraced them, and other times kept them at arms length, even when those technologies have presented clear opportunities to extend the reach, impact and quality of journalism. The advent of photography in the early 19 th century was quickly seen as significant by Samuel F. B. Morse, most well known for his role in the invention of the electromagnetic telegraph (http://www.morsehistoricsite.org/). Morse introduced American newspapers to the budding technology of photography after a visit to France where he had seen the daguerreotype (an early form of photography invented by French artist and chemist Louis J. M. Daguerre and his collaborator, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype). Morse had visited Paris in 1839 and upon his return to New York wrote this description of the daguerreotype. Morse said, it is “one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age.” His description was published in the New York Observer on April, 20, 1839. Similarly, Walt Whitman, celebrated American poet and former editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published on July 2, 1846 in his newspaper these poetic words of praise for the daguerreotype: “In whatever direction you turn your peering gaze, you see naught but human faces! There they stretch, from floor to ceiling--hundreds of them. Ah! what tales might those pictures tell if their mute lips had the power of speech! How romance then, would be infinitely outdone by fact” (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/collections/dag/langarts.html).

Soon, newspapers across the country began publishing daguerreotype images, enriching the storytelling abilities of the newspaper medium. An early news photograph taken in 1853 using daguerreotype technology is available online at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/dag:@field(NUMBER%2B@band(cph%2B3j00126). It depicts a boating tragedy on the Niagara River in New York (leading to the great falls on the U.S. and Canadian border) where three men in a boat were overwhelmed by the river's strong current and had crashed into a rock. As the U.S. Library of Congress notes on its web site, “The current carried two men immediately over the Falls to their deaths. The daguerreotype shows the third man, stranded on a log which had jammed between two rocks. He weathered the current for eighteen hours before succumbing to the river.”

Later, the telegraph was embraced by newspapers as well, despite its prohibitive cost. In fact, a group of New York newspaper publishers formed the Associated Press largely in order to make use of the expensive technology more economical (http://www.ap.org/pages/about/history/history_first.html). Not only that, but a new form of newswriting emerged, now familiar to all in journalism as the inverted pyramid. Largely due to the cost and unreliability of the telegraph, the inverted pyramid encouraged reporters to put the most important facts first, in case the telegraph failed during transmission.

Later, GuglielmoMarconi's invention of the wireless led to the advent of radio and thereby radio news reporting, and eventually laid the foundation for the most widely seen news medium in history, the television.

Yet, along the way, media organizations have often not made the development of new technologies a central part of their business strategy, as noted by media management authority Robert Picard in a lecture at Fordham University, March 10, 2006. In fact, media organizations, particularly news organizations, have typically had very small budgets for research and development, often less than one percent of their overall operating budget.

On a few notable occasions U.S. media organizations have invested substantially in the development of new media technologies. In the early days of radio and television some media leaders invested significantly in the development of new forms of radio and television, and some have invested significant amounts more recently in the development of cable, high definition and digital television. In the mid-1990s, Time Warner invested millions of dollars in the ill-fated full-service network in Orlando, FL, in an attempt to bring video on demand into the home. In Brazil, media giant O Globo annually sponsored the Center for New Media at Columbia University in the mid- to late 1990s in an attempt to harness new media applications in journalism. For several years in the 1990s, the Knight-Ridder newspaper company sponsored the Information Design Lab in Boulder, CO, supporting the innovative work of newspaper design expert Roger Fidler to develop the flat panel newspaper. But, more often than not, media have shied away from investing significantly in new technologies and their development. Prof. Picard notes that in 2006, not a single major U.S. media organization is a sponsor of the pioneering MIT Media Lab, although Google is a sponsor as is Bertelsmann AG, the German media giant (see the Media Lab sponsor list at http://www.media.mit.edu/sponsors/sponsors.html).

Most commonly, media executives prefer to let others, like a cautious penguin, test the waters first, rather than risk diving in and becoming a quick meal for a killer whale
(http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/antarctica/QA/animals/Penguin_Survival).

The rise of the Internet and World Wide Web are a case in point. These technologies have grown dramatically during the past decade or so. Citizens around the world have availed themselves of these technologies, thoroughly immersing themselves in everything from Web surfing to blogging to email and instant messaging. Yet, as noted in the third edition of the Project for Excellence in Journalism's (PEJ) annual report tracking and analyzing the state of the American news media published March 13, 2006 (http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2006/index.asp), U.S. newspapers and television network news divisions have only recently begun to make serious investments online to capture new readers and keep existing ones. In its 2005 State of the News Media report, PEJ noted that “creativity in new technology appeared to be coming mostly from non-news organizations like Google.” Online revenues for news media are growing more rapidly than print revenue (about 33% a year growth for online advertising revenues, versus 3% a year growth for print advertising revenues), but still are just a fraction of total advertising revenues for newspapers. One estimate suggests that online advertising revenues will not overtake those of print until 2017
(http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003872).

Technological Opportunities

News media seeking an advantage in a shifting and sometimes shrinking news marketplace should look more closely at emerging new technologies as an opportunity to experiment and build and keep new audiences. Otherwise, other innovators will get there first and the world of journalism and its role in society will continue to shrink.

Following are four ways innovative news media could look to new technologies for potentially fruitful opportunities.

First, new technologies often present new and more efficient ways for journalists to do their work. Mobile and handheld technologies, for instance, are among the most significant technologies for journalists. Utilizing such technologies more widely in journalism would give newspapers the opportunity to keep reporters in the field more and gathering more news. Newspapers should seriously consider providing such technologies to their reporters the same way they now provide desktop computers and high-speed Internet access for communication and online research. Current handheld devices permit not just communication from the field but also low-cost digital photography. What's more, these devices can provide efficient access to navigational services such as Mapquest, permitting reporters to get helpful directions while in the field. Moreover, easy access to the global positioning system (GPS) can enable advances in reporting quality and precision and even help reporters easily and quickly find their way to an unfamiliar location.

Second, the nature of storytelling can be transformed in potentially positive and engaging ways, especially with younger audiences. Most obviously, equipping reporters with mobile communications and news gathering technologies can facilitate mobile blogging. Audiences around the world have already demonstrated their appetite for blogs, and mobile blogging is among the next trends in web logs. Similarly, newspapers and other news media can more easily produce news podcasts by equipping reporters with low-cost hand-held digital audio recording technology.

On a more advanced level, news media can look to experimental news storytelling forms such as the Situated Documentary developed by the author and his colleague Steven Feiner, computer science professor at Columbia University (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/mars/mjwSd.html). Utilizing wearable technologies known as Mobile Augmented Reality Systems (MARS), the Situated Documentary permits news consumers to visit sites of past news events (recent or distant past) and re-live those news events via immersive multimedia presentations embedded into the real world. The authors students have produced a series of situated documentaries about events that occurred on the Columbia University Morningside Heights campus (see http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/mars/mjwSd.html). Among the stories reported are the 1968 student strike or revolt, the Col. Edwin Armstrong story (as a Columbia engineering professor, Armstrong invented FM radio) and the prehistory of the campus, when in the mid-19 th century it was home to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane. The user can re-experience any of these past events told journalistically by walking the campus while wearing what the author and his computer science colleague Prof. Steven Feiner call the Mobile Journalist Workstation (MJW, a wearable computer with see-through headworn display, high-speed wireless Internet access, a head-tracker to permit hands-free interactivity via gaze approximation—the wearer simply looks at an object for about a half second to select it rather than pointing and clicking using a hand-held mouse—and the Global Position System, or GPS (satellite navigation). It is a rough approximation of a virtual time machine. With next-generation three-dimensional or stereoscopic videography now being tested in digital video laboratories, the possibilities will be taken to an entirely new level of realism. Creating content for presentation on the MJW is relatively simple. Content creators can design and edit multimedia content for mobile device display using location-aware features without relying on programmer assistance (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/people/sinem/papers/Authoring-ISWC2003/S.Guven-ISWC2003.pdf). Similar systems are being tested in real-world museum applications, including at cultural and historical sites such as Pompeii, Italy (e.g., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/3954659.stm).

Another example of innovation in experimental news and information presentations is provided by a web site known as ChicagoCrime (www.chicagocrime.org). ChicagoCrime is a freely searchable database of crime in Chicago, IL, the third largest city in the United States, with a population of roughly three million. ChicagoCrime is an example of what is called “mashup” media. It is a convergence of data published by others, but put into a new form, one in this case both easily accessible and visual. The data being mashed up are from the crime data reported by the Chicago Police Department, the Citizen ICAM (http://12.17.79.6/) and mapping and satellite data provided by Google (www.google.com). Citizen ICAM stands for Information Collection for Automated Mapping) a system developed by the Chicago Police Department for use by its police officers.

By mashing up these data, ChicagoCrime provides users a highly detailed, interactive and useful look at where crimes have been reported in Chicago. Users can browse the data in a variety of ways, including by crime type including arson, homicide, assault and gambling; by street all the way down to the block level, and map nearby crimes; by date with users able to get detailed hour-by-hour lists of all crime reports; by police district or beat; by ZIP (postal) code, such as 60615 • 60634 • 60659; by Ward (a ward is a political district), such as Ward 3 • Ward 23 • Ward 44; by type of location, including ATM (automated bank teller machine), CTA train (Chicago Transit Authority, or mass public transit), gas station, or bowling alley; by city map, where users can sort crimes by various criteria (e.g., person, property, society), and view them on one map; or by route, where users can draw a line on the map of Chicago and see crimes along that route. Users draw the route by simply clicking on two or more points on the map displayed on screen, and the web site automatically connects the dots. Then, crime reported any where on that route will be displayed. This might be useful if a person or family walks or plans to walk, drive or take the bus along a particular route, say to and from school, work or house of worship. Crime data available go back to November, 2005, and will be stored indefinitely on the site. Having grown up just outside Chicago, I would have found this particular web site of immense value. As a test, I selected a route I traveled to dinner on recent visit to the “windy city” (called that because of its proximity to Lake Michigan, one of America's Great Lakes, and subject to strong winds off the lake). I was shocked but not entirely surprised to the density of the color-coded virtual pins in my mapped route, with dozens of crimes of many types (e.g., criminal possession of a weapon: hand gun, battery, domestic battery, theft, burglary, narcotics possession: heroin) appearing on my screen. Needless to say, I may take a different route to dinner next time I find myself in Chicago.

ChicagoCrime is not exactly storytelling. It is more like what one might call on-demand, interactive or customizable information graphics. But it is visually the sort of news or information graphics often seen in newspapers or other news media, and is what U.S. news media like to call “news you can use.” What could be more useful to citizens than being able to find out precisely and immediately how dangerous their community is? Unfortunately for the news media, it is not being provided by one of their own. It is one more example of innovation in news being delivered by someone else. Providing community news once was the bread and butter of local newspapers. Unless they find a way to capture and utilize the capabilities afforded by new media, their bread and butter will soon be stale and moldy (and not to mention inedible).

An interesting variation on the idea of mash-up media is provided by the Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University's Computer Science Department (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/). Led by Prof. Kathleen McKeown. McKeown's group has applied a branch of artificial intelligence known as natural language processing to develop the Columbia Newsblaster, an AI system that mashes up published news reports from dozens (potentially even hundreds or thousands) of news sources available online and synthesizes them into easily read news digests. As reported on the Newsblaster web site, the “system automatically collects, clusters, categorizes, and summarizes news from several sites on the web (CNN, Reuters, Fox News, etc.) on a daily basis, and it provides users a user-friendly interface to browse the results. Articles on the same story from various sources are presented together and summarized using state-of-the-art techniques. The Newsblaster system has already caught the attention of the press and public. A recent analysis indicates that Newsblaster receives tens of thousands of hits a day, and news agencies that have written articles about Newsblaster include the New York Times, USA Today, and Slashdot.” Following is a sample from Newsblaster on March 16, 2006. See if passes the Turing Test (computer pioneer Alan Turing's famed test of AI: can a person tell if they were talking to/interacting with a person or a computer). Here's what Newsblaster reported about the Dubai Ports World deal based on a summary of 33 articles published between March 13 and 16. First is the Newsblaster-generated headline, then the Newsblaster-generated story (or at least the first half of it). “ Homeland Security initially balked at ports deal. Dubai Ports World, a state-owned international port operator, cleared its last major hurdle yesterday in acquiring a British company that helps run several U.S. terminals, including Baltimore's, the companies said yesterday. Several opponents of the sale said that the 45-day investigation of DP World's purchase of the British company operating the port facilities could ease their concerns about the deal if the President Bush administration shares the findings.”
(http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/)

For those interested in the potential of mash-up media, one of the best resources online is www.programmableweb.com. This Web site provides an easy, step-by-step approach to making mash-up media as well as dozens of other popular mash-ups and other mash-up resources.

Third, new technologies have enormous implications for the management, structure and culture of news organizations. For instance, by utilizing the technologies described earlier, a news organization can explore the possibilities of what the author calls the Virtual Newsroom. This is a news room without walls. It can be established in nearly any community using high-speed wireless and mobile media. Editors and reporters need not meet daily in a physical setting. Instead, reporters can stay where they should: in the field, gathering news, observing news events, interviewing sources, and other wise keeping their finger on the pulse of the community or beat they are assigned. The virtual newsroom represents a potentially significant cost saving, and an improvement in news coverage. News management can also be advanced significantly using new technologies. Among the more interesting opportunities is emerging software that will enable editors to quickly and easily detect plagiarism and attribution issues, a problem area that has been increasingly rampant in journalism. One technology now under development and testing is LexisNexis CopyGuard (http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=11466). Although an initial test of the system by the Baltimore Sun proved less than reliable in detecting plagiarism, future generations of the technology are promising. CopyGuard uses technology developed by “ iParadigms, the Oakland, Calif., software developer of Turnitin, a popular academic plagiarism-detection tool. Using iParadigms’ 'pattern-matching' engine, CopyGuard compares each submitted document to more than 6.1 billion documents in LexisNexis and web databases, and then identifies any matching phrases and their respective sources.” This can be done in a matter of minutes or hours, as compared to a three-week manual examination by one editor at the Sun for alleged plagiarism and attribution problems in six years' worth of columns (600) by Michael Olesker. One of the limitations of the LexisNexis software is it relies exclusively on material published and stored in the LexisNexis database (largely news media). It does not scan the entire World Wide Web and Internet, which may in fact be a resource an unscrupulous or lazy reporter might turn to.

Finally, perhaps the most important opportunity presented by technology is the transformation of the relationships between or among news organizations and their many publics, particularly their audiences, sources, funders, regulators and competitors. In many cases, these relationships are already being deeply transformed. The question, “Who is a journalist?” most quickly comes to mind. With citizens blogging, podcasting and otherwise publishing their own content, media of all types are seeing their marketplace fragment even further, among a growing abundance of digital media content, including news or news-like content.

Digital Dilemmas

This is all not to say that new technology presents only positive possibilities for journalism. In fact, many of the most significant effects of technology have been damaging or potentially so to journalism. Digital photography has lead to not just less expensive news photos taken closer to deadline. It has also made it easier than ever to create doctored photos, even manipulated news video that is visually authentic to even the most experienced eye. Online news has created an environment in which speed and currency often take precedence over accuracy, fact checking and multiple sourcing. These and other ethical concerns must be paramount in an age of lightning quick and powerful technological convergence. Otherwise, public trust in the news media will erode and whither, and without credibility, the news has no value, in either a democratic or a commercial sense.

The 21st century will likely witness a continuing and fundamental transformation of journalism. This future promises to bring a highly fragmented and active news audience, intense media competition, and scarce advertising dollars. Through innovation, professional journalism can reassert its role as the information lifeline of democracy. The question is whether news media and their leaders will embrace emerging technologies to help lead that transformation. Or will news decision-makers simply follow the lead of others, letting professional journalism fade into a limited and secondary role in society.

References

http://www.morsehistoricsite.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/collections/dag/langarts.html
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/dag:@field(NUMBER%2B@band(cph%2B3j00126) http://www.ap.org/pages/about/history/history_first.html
Picard, Robert, “The Economic State of Media Industries,” Lecture at Fordham University, New York, March 10, 2006.
http://www.media.mit.edu/sponsors/sponsors.html
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/antarctica/QA/animals/Penguin_Survival
http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2006/index.asp
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003872
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/mars/mjwSd.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/3954659.stm
http://www.chicagocrime.org
http://12.17.79.6
http://www.google.com
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/
http://www.programmableweb.com
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=11466
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/people/sinem/papers/Authoring-ISWC2003/S.Guven-ISWC2003.pdf