To understand what most industries and workers will go through in the transition to the Digital Age, it's worth looking at one industry that's bound to go through it first.
The media business is, by definition, one of the core industries of the information age. As the Digital Revolution fundamentally changes the way information is produced and disseminated, expect the media to be traumatized first.
All sectors of the media, from broadcast television to the movie industry to the book publishing world, are already experiencing varying degrees of trauma that will only worsen in the coming decades.
Cheaper digital tools, such as multimedia equipment and software, will allow much smaller competitors to emulate the feats that once took multi-million dollar budgets. And the new information infrastructure will open up a distribution channel that will undermine the monopolistic channels used now.
The handful of broadcast television networks, already hit by cable TV, will really suffer when 500 channels or more can flow into your home. The elite book publishing houses, which authors now beg to publish their manuscripts, will find those authors can distribute their ideas in other electronic forms.
In the Digital Age, as a general rule, all monopolies, certainly media monopolies, will be forced to compete. But there's one media industry that might suffer more than most because it's more a creature of the fading Industrial Age.
Newspapers were born at the dawn of the Industrial Age and matured through every stage in its evolution, and they've ended up as reflections of that era.
Newspapers are elaborate factories for mass-producing news on an assembly line: Every day, reporters gather information, write stories and pass them down the line. The front-line editors shape up the basic ideas and pass the stories to the copy editors, who do the refining. Then the stories move to other editors, who gather the stories and photographs and other artwork from all the specialized departments, piece the newspaper together and send the whole thing to the production crews.
Then the multimillion-dollar printing presses churn out hundreds of thousands of copies of the same newspaper that are bundled together and tossed into a fleet of delivery trucks. These trucks drive all over in the middle of the night, handing the bundles to the delivery people, the last link in the assembly line, who then drop the papers at each house.
This method of delivering news has worked fine for generations. But it's on a collision course with the Digital Age.
A key concept of the Digital Age is the difference between "atoms," which make up physical products, and "bits," which make up the intangible digital language of computers.
That's how Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes the fundamental schism between the Industrial Age economy, which primarily produces physical things, and a Digital Age economy, which will primarily deal with intangible information.
Newspapers are now in the atom business, producing a physical product. But what they're really selling is pure information, which is easily converted to intangible bits. And once the new information infrastructure reaches into the home and information "appliances" become more sophisticated, which is generally expected to happen in the next 10 years or so, the newspaper's product will rapidly shift from atoms to bits.
 | This is a mockup of an electronic "news tablet" developed by Knight-Ridder Corp. "Personal information appliances" like this might someday replace printed newspapers. This version, roughly the dimensions of a magazine, would weigh about 2 pounds. In addition to text, the tablet's color screen would display areas to "click" for video and audio clips. |
This changeover opens the newspaper industry up to direct competition from some pretty big players. For one, all players in the media business are beginning to translate their products into digital form. Broadcast television, cable, movie studios, book publishing -- all are going digital.
In this digital world, everything gets reduced to the 1's and 0's of computer language and transmitted as streams of simple electronic pulses. That means that written text, photos, video, and sound essentially are the same when being distributed.
On top of that, industries that never competed with the media, commercial online services and telecommunications and computer firms that are building the infrastructure and related technologies, are beginning to experiment with providing content. Such companies as Microsoft, the software giant, are toying with the idea of setting up newsrooms.
That's partly why so many corporate mergers and alliances are taking place between companies in the previously distinct fields of media, entertainment, cable television, telephones and computers.
They're all realizing that they're in roughly the same business: creating, producing, handling, transporting and distributing digital information, or bits.
Newspapers can't just look over their shoulders, worrying about the big guys. They've potentially got an even bigger problem with the little guys scrambling around their feet.
Today you need to own those million-dollar printing presses and a fleet of trucks to deliver an in-depth, printed version of daily news. Without this huge investment in an elaborate distribution system, you simply can't compete. That's partly why most cities and towns in the country have only one major daily paper.
Once an alternative digital delivery system is in place -- one that allows the free flow of all kinds of information products -- that monopoly could get blown to bits, so to speak.
At that point, almost all the costs of creating a news product will come from gathering, analyzing, writing and presenting information. The actual costs of delivering the news will approach zero. That means 10 good journalists could deliver a specialized news product on, say, business, that could directly compete with the big daily. Another 10 might focus on entertainment, and so on.
Taking it a step further, some people are beginning to think about a form of "Way New Journalism," in which individual writers, artists, photographers, could sell their work directly to consumers for, say, a penny a piece. Consumers could buy 35 "pieces" of special interest to them for roughly the same cost of an entire paper today. Journalists would get $2,000 if 200,000 people bought their piece.
An even more radical possibility is that everyone could be a reporter in some way. This information infrastructure will be interactive, allowing people to send as well as receive information. After all, one of the most powerful news reports of the 1990s was delivered by an ordinary person who simply knew how to point a video camera and shoot -- as police officers beat Rodney King.
We'll still need professional journalists who approach issues with balance or particular expertise. And for some time, the big daily papers will have huge competitive advantages against upstarts in their markets.
And over the long haul, they may be able to trade on their brand-name recognition as people look to those they trust to make sense of the chaos of information. And in an information age, when the quality of content will take on increasing importance, the old newspapers could emerge as the ones who can provide the best information.
Also, newspapers are more than just providers of information. At their best, they act as a focal point for a community, a forum for the discussion of important public issues. It's not clear who else could do that.
But one thing is almost certain: Newspapers won't be the only game in town.
If that's not enough to worry about, here's the kicker: Newspapers face the distinct possibility that advertisers won't need them anymore.
Advertising is the lifeblood of newspapers. That 35 cents you stick in the newsstand doesn't even begin to pay for the paper. Without classified and display advertising, newspapers as we know them could not exist.
One of the key concepts of the Digital Age is "disintermediation" -- the act of getting rid of middlemen. Once an information infrastructure is in place, consumers will have more direct access to advertising, and companies will be able to reach them directly through a digital form of direct mail.
People will potentially have less need for the traditional middlemen, like newspapers and broadcast television.
With such high stakes, newspapers aren't taking any chances. Many publishers are making a mad dash into the online world, whether or not they have a good workable model for making money on it. In a recent survey of 650 papers, about 80 are already publishing electronic "newspapers" online, and 40 more will launch into cyberspace by the end of the year.
No one expects that printed newspapers will disappear in a last puff of Industrial Age smoke. In communications history, new media, like television, supersede older media, like radio, but they rarely obliterate them. More likely, the old and the new end up coexisting in some way.
The story of radio is a good one for those in the newspaper industry to contemplate today. A radio executive in the 1940s could have made an argument that nothing would displace radio from its place in American society. Think of the emotional power of the medium that entertained American families during the Great Depression and gave them their news dispatches during World War II. That executive could have argued that television sets were too expensive for most people, anyway.
By the 1960s -- just 20 years later -- television had become the electronic medium defining American society and culture. American families huddled around television sets, not radios. And television often defined national news and determined the outcome of presidential politics.
Today we still have radio, and it retains a loyal following for its popular music and call-in talk shows. But it is no longer Americans' primary source of news and information; the medium's only major news organization -- National Public Radio -- depends on government funds, grants and listener donations.
Luckily for them, radio networks like CBS didn't listen to the radio chauvinists. They moved as quickly as they could into the world of TV.
Newspaper publishers, in the long run, may well follow a similar path.
