Unsurprisingly, the following headline in The Australian, Newspapers gone by 2022 says futurist, caught my eye. Surely, I thought, someone wasn't foolishly putting a date on the demise of print.
The answer: no. The headline writer had got carried away. The self-styled "futurist" Ross Dawson had merely said that "newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant within 12 years". By that time, most journalism will be "crowdsourced".
That's the message he will convey to an Australian Newspaper Publishers' Association forum on Thursday along with a prediction that "within 10 years", mobile reading devices will be our "primary news interfaces."
Here's more from Dawson (according to his own blog, "a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy adviser, and bestselling author"):
We are shifting to a media economy, dominated by content and social connection...
Media revenues will soar but will be unevenly distributed... Established media organisations will need to reinvent themselves to participate in that growth...
More sophisticated news readers will be foldable, or rollable, gesture-controlled and fully interactive.
Dawson believes journalism will be "increasingly crowdsourced", with "hordes of amateurs overseen by professionals". And the reputation of individual journalists will attract audiences.
Looking at current trends, that sounds about right, doesn't it?
Source: The Australian
