"To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within 10 years — vanished, without a trace." —Michael Crichton, April 1993¹

"[T]he Internet multimedia information-retrieval system ... appears on the verge of becoming a mass medium itself. If the medium is the message, then the message these days is the World Wide Web." —The New York Times, Nov. 20, 1995²

"As it expands at an astounding rate, the [World Wide] Web's colorful entanglement of words, pictures, sound, and motion is briskly becoming more than just a new medium. It's more like a parallel universe that mirrors the real world." —Wired, February 1996³

"Newspapers will always exist because men need to read something while they go to the bathroom."⁴ That was the declaration of veteran newspaper reporter Cathy Best, Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, over a year ago. As a journalist, it is easy to see how she could be so optimistic about the future of her career, but maybe it really is that simple: We will always use newspapers because they are convenient, portable. It is foreseeable, however, that institutions such as the venerable New York Times, which has been putting out its "daily miracle" since 1851, will not exist 50 years from now. Furthermore, what about television and radio? Surely they will exist, but in what form? Will they become fully incorporated into the World Wide Web, or will they continue on separately? What will happen to the changing face of new news media will be discussed below.

This century has witnessed the rise and decline of print, radio, and network television as primary sources of news for most Americans. The pace of change is constantly accelerating in all aspects of life, including the media. "Change sweeps through the highly industrialized countries with waves of ever-accelerating speed and unprecedented impact."⁵ That was written by futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970, well before the "Information Superhighway"⁶ came into being. From Gutenberg to Bell to Marconi to Turner, as technology has advanced the transfer of information has become more and more rapid, altering the character of society, the media, and politics. The age of the Marshall McLuhan's global village is giving way to the age of the global house as technology makes it easier and easier to communicate. The opinions on how and to what degree the change will occur vary a great deal, from people who feel that, like the telephone, the Internet is just being over idealized and will not turn out to be that useful, to ever-impressed people like Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, who sees the Internet as a great unifying force, connecting humans with a giant, singular computer:

We'll communicate with it through a variety of devices, including some that look like television sets, some like today's PCs; some will look like telephones, and some will be the size and something like the shape of a wallet. And at the heart of each will be a powerful computer, invisibly connected to millions of others.
[And what about the scope of this vast new collective intellect?] In short, just about everything will be done differently.⁷

Needless to say, if Gates' vision were to come true, and everyone carries around a pocked-sized "computer," Best's newspaper-portability argument goes down the drain fast.

Regardless of how people receive information, will there still be a need for professionals called "journalists"? It looks like in the future, getting information about a candidate will be much easier. There need be no middleman, no journalist, no interpreter, no commentator interjecting her thoughts into facts, but all the raw data such as congressional voting records will be available at the touch of a button.⁸ The media currently have such a poor image with the public, the public may be more than happy to bypass it and go directly to the source.⁹ Lance Bennett will need to rewrite his book, adding as the final phase of the media: "Dead Dog Journalism." Then again, people may not like to pour over raw information and try to interpret it. "It's pretty well agreed that no matter what the medium, the essentials of journalism remain the same: Gather and report the news accurately, fairly and responsibly, giving readers, listeners, viewers — whatever they are called — balance, perspective and specific information."¹⁰ It would seem true that there will always be some kind of journalism on the World Wide Web, but that it may shrink as more and more people turn to sources of raw information, items such as texts of speeches, government statistics, and on-scene amateur photographs. Reading through a cyber-newspaper article or watching a TV newscast (which will both be easy to find) will no doubt remain an easier task than looking at charts of numbers and trying to make an interpretation, and for that reason, many people are optimistic about the future of the profession.

Then again, all this might be to blow the effects of the Internet way out of proportion. People invariably get excited about new forms of communication. Maybe the media will be able to continue along relatively unchanged by the World Wide Web. "The telephone would bring peace on earth, eliminate southern accents, revolutionize surgery, stamp out 'heathenism' abroad and save the farm by making farmers less lonely."¹¹ H.G. Wells thought the telephone would reduce traffic congestion because people would leave the cities.¹² These are some of the things people have been saying about the Internet, too. People talk all the time about how the Internet is going to globalize the earth, speed up all forms of communication, make English even more dominant as a world language, eliminate the need for cities. The telephone did not do any of the above things it was hoped it would, maybe the same will happen to the 'Net. So we still cannot say whether the 'Net will replace the existing media or it will supplement them, but it depends on one's paradigm. If the Web is to become simply a new medium it will probably supplement the existing ones, just as radio, TV, and cable TV all did in their respective infancies. However, if the Web is to become a "mirror universe" then it could very well eliminate the need for existing media outlets.

It will certainly have at least limited impact, though, just like the phone did. Perhaps the next step after cable television (the last thing to revolutionize the way Americans get their news) is the Internet, but such a certain conclusion in any direction would be hard to reach at this point. Wired magazine, always on the vanguard of technology, says that broadcast's "one-to-many" style of communication is "tired" and "many-to-many"-style communication of the Internet is "wired." But before going any further, it is necessary to define what the Internet will include before making a prediction about its viability as a major source of news. Will the Internet take on the characteristics of print, or will it look more like television on a computer screen? Now most Internet sites show more text than photos and nearly all photos are stills, but in the future, as technology is enhanced, there may be more and more video appearing on the Internet. It is hard to retrieve photos now, it takes a long time, but the process will surely speed up as technology advances. As shown by the photo in Figure 1, there may even be a fusion of cable television services and the Internet, so that watching CNN on a computer screen becomes as easy as watching it on a television, and the two mediums become indistinguishable. This leaves the moot question: Will it be phone companies or cable providers that wire people' homes for the 'Net?

The Internet will probably go through a phase, which we are currently in, that will be characterized as the "text-driven" phase. As soon as the technology advances far enough, the Internet will enter a brief "photograph-driven" phase, and finally a "video-driven" phase. By the time we get to the video-driven phase, the Internet may actually be delivered to the home via cables similar to those used for cable television, and therefore distinguishing between the two will become increasingly difficult. These phases will have different effects on the profession of journalism. Most major metropolitan newspapers have web sites. This is a harbinger of things to come during the text-driven phase. After that, though, it may be that people turn more and more to the web sites of TV networks, so they can see the events unfold at the touch of a button instead of read about them. The glory of a 'Net TV site is that "viewers" can call up any story whenever they want. They are not stuck with the choices of the producer (who may have wildly different tastes than them) and they wouldn't need to sit through the prattle of an anchor. This will help those companies accordingly, but will not be helpful for their current enterprises, that of actual TV news broadcasts.

One of the most important points when looking at the Internet is how people will use the new medium. If it is, after all, just a parallel universe, then all the institutions that have developed over the last two centuries will simply switch an increasing proportion of their output onto the Web (this is true, incidentally, for more than just the media, but just about all industries will be affected). The question of most importance is: Will people tend to access the sites that are run by large media corporations like CNN and USA Today, or not. "The genius and triumph of the Internet, after all, is the fact that the humblest home page is as accessible as the slickest corporate site."¹³ This is a question of major importance because if the public continues to go to web sites that are run by people who are already in the media, the power of journalism will remain with those who have it already. While it is logical to expect that people would gravitate to well-advertized web sites, it would also seem that existing media organizations would maintain the best web pages because they have all the human resources necessary for the job.

Reality will probably find a middle ground. Some people will be syphoned off by the amateurs, but the media professionals from familiar outlets will continue to pull in the majority of the users (though a smaller majority than in the era of broadcast). The initial surge of idealism about the 'Net's ability to create a multiplicity of challengers to the established media has become tempered over time: "At the beginning I thought a bunch of kids in a garage somewhere would put out a kick-ass publication [on the 'Net] that challenged The New York Times and reduced it to rubble. But where's the real journalism on the 'Net? Where's the challenger to CNN? The cost of doing world coverage is so huge, it's not going to come from some kids in their garage."¹⁴ The New York Times already has the resources, trained journalists, clout, advertising, to make a spectacular Web page that attracts as large a readership as their actual newspaper, while the garage-kids would have to start from scratch. However, it is much easier to start from scratch on the internet than to start up a newspaper from scratch. To start up a virtual newspaper one only needs a Web address and people who are willing to work on the project, but to start up a newspaper one needs a phalanx of printing machines, tons of ink, a fleet of trucks. If existing outlets come to dominate the Web, journalists have nothing to fear: the 'Net will become nothing more than an electronic reflection of the media today, but if start-up garage kids attract an audience (probably a special-interest audience, if they are to be successful) journalism as we have grown to know it will change drastically.

How will the American people as a whole come out of this? It is hard to argue how this new technology could make life for us worse. As technology continues to advance the public becomes more and more involved in the political dialogue (surely the number of message coming into congressional offices has skyrocketed since the mass-use of the Internet began), and the hypodermic-effects media effect model becomes less and less accurate. With the Internet there is sure to be an expansion of the number of places people can turn to for information. The question that needs to be asked, though, is whether all this increased dialog will make the public even more cynical of government, as forms of talk radio and talk television seem to have already. Unfortunately, it seems that psychologically when strangers get together on the air or in cyberspace, it is easier for them to deride the government than support it, and the increased political discourse on the Internet's chat rooms may be bad for democracy after all. As Professor Owen pointed out in class, the respect accorded government, even the basic constitutional framework, is already at an all-time low. What could happen if faith in government gets much below its current level?

Another central issue to how the Internet and the World Wide Web will advance is that of capitalism. People who have a web-site will need to make money in the long run if there is to be any further gravitation to the Web. There seems to be no reason why major corporations will not begin advertizing on the Web, just as they advertize in print, and on radio and TV now. On the Web, advertisers can have the best of all three at their disposal. What is important though, is that if this fails to occur, the Web will not take off, and the media as we know it will continue on relatively unchanged until such time as it does. It is also possible to charge for Internet services such as access to a Web site or for a daily e-mail message. Though not widely practiced yet, such charges could become the equivalent to subscription fees for print media. As it is now, there are only 20 million people who regularly use the Web,¹⁵ probably not enough to warrant all the hype that the medium has received so far. But, that figure will surely climb, just as those owning a radio and those owning a television rose from nothing to virtually 100 percent of the population. As the number of people accessing the World Wide Web climbs, the more companies will notice it as a forum for their advertisements. It has begun already, and it will surely continue to climb in the years ahead: "With the Web audience hitting critical mass, we are about to witness a creative explosion in the area of on-line advertising and marketing."¹⁶ As access gets easier, quality of the sites improves, and the two trends work to reinforce each other.

There are more questions than answers about the future of the Web and the existing media. After dealing with two different but interrelated topics: how will people get their news? and what will happen to people called "journalists"? Regarding both: Only time will tell what evolves. As for the original question: will the media as we know it exist in 50 years? At this point there are a variety of answers. "Newspapers and broadcast media will be with us for a very long time. the 'Net doesn't obliterate old media, it merely redefines it," said Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine.¹⁷ Kelly is probably right. With each advance in technology there has been an expansion of outlets, but not a complete replacement of the old set by the newer. Radio was invented but newspapers continued to exist, TV became popular but radio continued to exist; following the same pattern, when the Internet takes full root, the old media will not go away, but will just come to occupy a smaller and more well-defined niche in people's lives. So, that bodes well for journalists, but they have another chance, because people will probably still need good journalism on the Web.

Figure 1: Source: Wired December 1996. Toshiba advertisement, 165.

¹As quoted by Lasica, J.D., introduction.

²Markoff, A1.

³Schwartz, 74.

⁴Personal interview, September 1995.

⁵Toffler, 3.

⁶The term was popularized by Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) before he became vice president.

⁷Gates, 4, 7.

⁸This is a problem for more than just journalists: "The digital age is turning middlemen everywhere into endangered species. Already, travel agents, stock brokers, traders, real estate agents, bank tellers and insurance brokers are polishing up their resumes" (Lasica, under the heading "Goodbye, Gutenberg?").

⁹"The apparently endless flow of scandals and feeding frenzies [in the press] . . . has damaged, rather than enhanced, journalism's credibility," --Ellen Hume of Northwestern University (Harwood).
Also consider the following opinion from a reader: "On the 'Net, I want to read the views of the experts themselves who make the news. I am, in fact, often annoyed by the interpretation supplied by the intervening journlist" (Lasica, under the heading "Culture Clash: When Worlds Collide").

¹⁰Fitzgerald, 72.

¹¹Pearl.

¹²Ibid.

¹³Lasica, under the section "Who's on the Playing Field."

¹⁴Ibid.

¹⁵Schwartz, 74. This is the most liberal estimate I came across; others were half that.

¹⁶Judson, Bruce, general manager of Time Inc. New Media, a unit of Time Warner, quoted in Carmody.

¹⁷Lasica, under the section "Goodbye, Gutenberg?"

Carmody, Deirdre. "Magazines: Old distinctions blur. Advertising on-line now involves audience consent." New York Times 17 July 1995: D7.

Fitzgerald, Mark. "The Effect of the Internet on Print Journalism." Editor and Publisher 13 Apr. 1996: 61, 72.

Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Harwood, Richard. "Extinct Stained Wretches?" Op-Ed. Washington Post 2 Nov. 1995: A31.

Lasica, J.D. "Net Gain." American Journalism Review Nov. 1996: 20+. (I found it on Lexis/Nexis!)

Markoff, John. "If Medium Is the Message, the Message is the Web." New York Times. 20 Nov. 1995: A1, D5.

Pearl, Daniel. "Futurist Schlock: Today's Cyberhype has a Familiar Ring." Wall Street Journal 7 Sept. 1995: A1

Schwartz, Evan I. "Advertising Webonomics 101." Wired Feb. 1996: 74, 76-77, 80-82.

Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970.