‘The Internet is a Game Changer’ -- A Paperless World (Ramzy Baroud)

Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

May 27, 2010 -- The debate is no longer confined to a few academics in distant universities. It is now a widely prevalent, mainstream topic of discussion: How will the news of the future be distributed?

The jury is still out, but not completely. Increasingly, we are driven to believe that the future will be paperless. Some argue that the “paper” will be taken out of the “newspaper” within a few years. Their logic might have come across as far-fetched in the late 1990s, but it can hardly be dismissed in 2010.

Two American intellectuals added their voices to the chorus of those predicting that the print media would not continue to define the news for long. In October 2009, Leonard Downie Jr., vice president at large and former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, professor of Communication at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, co-authored a 98-page paper entitled, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism.”

Here, they made the assertion that: “Newspapers and television news are not going to vanish in the foreseeable future.... But they will play diminished roles in an emerging and still rapidly changing world of digital journalism, in which the means of news reporting are being re-invented, the character of news is being reconstructed, and reporting is being distributed across a greater number and variety of news organizations, new and old.”

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