LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: NEWSPAPERS FACE FUTURE OF CHANGE

Given a choice between recapping last year's news or speculating about what next year might bring, I would choose to look into the future. Rehashing old news won't change what happened.

In newspaper circles, much is being made of the changing technology and the impact the so-called information highway will have on how news is delivered and presented. This is the same soul-searching that occurred when radio took to the airwaves and when television finally found sponsors for news broadcasts.

Do you remember the early days of TV news? Advertisers doubted anyone would be interested in serious information on what was then expected to be an entertainment medium. Cigarette makers, auto manufacutures and sellers of household cleaning products put their sales effort into game shows and variety shows and daytime continuing dramas that were so heavily sponsored by detergents they became knows as "soaps."

In the early days, TV news struggled a lot. Remember Douglas Edwards and the 15-minute CBS evening newscast? Very often we watched test patterns when it came time for commercials. But newspapers recognized the potential of the instantaneous delivery of news. Most TV newspeople at first were veteran newspaper journalists, and they brought that mindset to their news medium. Newspaper folks worried whether TV would be the end of the newspapers. By the way, movie theater operators wondered the same thing.

Newspapers changed as a result of the competition from television. But instead of becoming more agressive in the gathering and dissemnating of news, newspapers for the most part competed by becoming more like television. Not like TV news, mind you, which was a lot like newspaper news, but like TV entertainment. Whole sections of newspapers became devoted to ideas and topics that quite frankly had very little to do with news at all. Most newspapers call this lifestyle news, even though they still can't agree whether "lifestyle" is one word, two words or a hyphenated word. But that's another discussion.

As technology brings hand-held computers closer to reality, we are at the dawn of an information era in which news consumers can receive digitized data by satellite from almost any point on the planet at almost any time of the day. News text can be accompanied by photographic images, charts (in color, of course) and even video and sound bites of major events. In a flash. In the palm of your hand.

Now newspapers and television both have something to be concerned about.

Thousands of Americans who have never touched a computer don't comprehend what is happening. Reading a newspaper or watching TV they understand. But accessing (See? You have to learn a new language too) a worldwide database to download whatever information is important to you at the moment -- that's harder to understand.

But don't think it isn't reality. It already is. At a recent newspaper meeting a college journalism faculty member talked about her school's daily paper has become a part of the Internet database, which means anyone with a computer, a modem and and Internet access can read the paper anywhere in the world before it is delivered to subscribers in the familiar newsprint package. Already the Internet version of the newspaper is being accessed 13,000 times a week, sometimes by a professor across the campus, and sometimes by an alumnus in Finland.

This is the future. Just as newspapers, radio and television have survived and, in many cases, thrived together, the new digital-communication partner is very likely to co-exist as well.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.