Media's Role In The New World
By Angie Lau
At-Large Member
What will the future look like in the year 2020?
Well, for one, we will be able to change our skin color as easily as we can change our eye color today. We’ll expect our employers to give us Friday off for a spiritual retreat with our yoga teacher. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags will track and transmit our movements, eliminating the need to call home.
So how do journalists fit into this new world? That’s the $64,000 ($500,000 in 2005 dollars) question. To prepare journalists of today for a brave new world of tomorrow, Executive Leadership Program stalwarts Dinah Eng and Victor Panichkul gathered an eclectic group of innovators and bloggers, entrepreneurs and engineers, technologists and futurists at the renowned Aspen Institute in Colorado last October to help brainstorm the future. The result: AAJA’s Vision 2020 summit.
Tanya Odom of the FutureWork Institute, one of the top 25 consulting firms in the nation, noted that before one envisions the future, one must understand the generation that will define it. For instance:
- This generation of viewers and readers uses three technologies: the Internet, mobile phones, and digital music.
- Eighty percent of the spending decisions made in the multi-trillion dollar global retail industry are made by women.
- Hispanics will be the nation’s largest minority market. Asians, African Americans, and Hispanics are already high consumers of digital media.
Are we talking about this in our newsrooms? Do journalists know that instead of the phone and e-mail (soooo old skule!), kids are IM-ing each other? Want to know what’s going on in that school under lockdown right now? Superintendent and officials not talking? Try IM-ing a student. You’ll find out fast.
For the rest of this story, see the Fall issue of the DateLine AAJA newsletter.
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