Page 217 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

“The Future” of Media

continued to be disseminated. It’s often easier to fear change than it is
to embrace it. A sign in a friend’s office had a Latin phrase that roughly
translated to “In waiting, one conquers all.” That might have been true
in his business, but not in ours. Convergence will wait for no one, so
you’d best be ready to go with it.

“The Future” of Media

In February 2004 the chairman of the New York Times Company and
publisher of The New York Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., told a
conference at Northwestern University in Chicago that convergence
was “the future” for America’s media. Sulzberger’s vision is one that
mirrors an early piece of prognostication by Nicholas Negroponte. In
his book, Being Digital, Negroponte forecast a time in which people
would be able to receive news that they felt was important and filter
out all others. Media services would provide what he called the “daily
me” for each individual who sought information. This filtered form
of journalism would include announcements and news narratives that
were focused on the issues that the individual had noted were impor- 207
tant to him or her. The information would be sent digitally to the
person’s home computer and could be perused at that person’s leisure.
Additional information would be provided as it surfaced (1995).
This vision seems elementary now, given the ability to blog, Web
surf, and e-mail. We can download information from computers,
PDAs, and cell phones. We sign up for e-mail offers at Web sites
and receive daily updates from companies and organizations. Negro-
ponte’s foresight, however, becomes remarkable when you realize that
he made it in the early 1990s, before the explosion of the Internet.
Given the continuing growth of broadband, it is likely that elec-
tronic commerce and convergence will far surpass the wildest dreams of
people like Negroponte. Early in 2004 the Pew Internet and American
Life Project reported that two in five people in the country accessed the
Internet via high-speed connections at home. Pew estimated that about
48 million people, or a quarter of all adults, had residential broadband.
Among college-educated adults aged 35 and younger, that number had
reached 52 percent, Pew said. In August 2004, Nielsen reported that
51 percent of American homes had broadband. Nielsen predicted the
number of broadband households would reach 62 percent by 2008.
Broadband makes Web-based convergence possible, because broad-
band users have a more intense relationship with the Internet and