An unknown future?

It seems like everything I read that concerns the world of journalism is focused on one thing: the future of print. Every blogger (including myself, ironically), every professor, every newscaster, every reporter: it seems like they all have one thing on the brain. And even if it isn't a prominent thought, I can't say it isn't something I often dwell on. After all, the newspaper is something every American citizen knows well and expects to see in his or her everyday life. But what about the day when the newspaper just doesn't come?

Editor Marti Covington and I were casually discussing the future of print at dinner earlier tonight and both came to similar epiphanies: why do we care so much about the future of print? While it's a huge concern and the thought of hundreds of my potential employers ceasing to print physical copies of their newspapers is scary, I have no fear that journalism will not continue to grow and thrive. When the Internet was invented and began to shape itself into what we know it as today, the world of journalism knew it was in for a big change. But why is that such a scary thing? Why is change so hard for people, namely the journalists themselves, to accept and even embrace?

Apple released the iPhone in the summer of 2007, the first phone with a "real" Internet browser on it. You don't just get the baby Internet that most mobile phones know, but you get the real deal. When I load up the New York Times on the iPhone, it's the same version I see when I access it from my MacBook. And if I can do that in 2007 (and now 2008), how will I be accessing NYTimes.com in 2015? Or 2030?

When I first began studying journalism, I was totally turned off by the idea of online journalism. Publishing my work somewhere that wasn't a physical, printed version of a newspaper or magazine wasn't anything I was interested in doing. Now, three years later, I'm finally beginning to warm up to it. I won't say I prefer it — yet — but I can see myself getting to that point soon. After all, what's not to like? Publishing online is instant, quickly correctable and easy to update. Also, it's nowhere near as harmful to the environment as printing and disposing of a newspaper, the shipping is cheap (just a monthly ISP bill) and wireless and the space is unlimited. Why don't we think it's too good to be true?

Thinking about the process of The DM, where the writers and photographers submit their assignments by 4 p.m. and 11 hours later Marti is sending a completed newspaper to the printer on Jackson Ave., is almost sickening because of the amount of time and effort it takes. But what if we didn't have a newspaper to print, rather just the web site from which you accessed this blog? What if we didn't have a 3 a.m. deadline for the printer and were able to publish the stories as they were turned in randomly throughout the day? What if we didn't have to spend 8 hours coming up with, implementing and then tweaking the design of the paper, just to come back the next day and do it again? Would it make our jobs easier and allow us to be on a more normal sleep schedule? I can't help but wonder.

In the end, I want print to stick around and I think it will, at least for a while. However, I won't be surprised the day the New York Times or the Washington Post stops printing weekday editions of their papers to focus on the Saturday and Sunday print versions while updating the web sites with their normal news coverage. And I won't be surprised when a device that downloads the morning online editions of my favorite newspapers so I can flip through them at my breakfast table is invented to replace the usually paperboy version.

Actually thinking about a feasible future for online journalism makes it much less scary than fretting about it all the time. I think it's something that could happen soon, that will happen eventually, and that we'll have to deal with. And though the Internet is still something new, shiny and somewhat scary to most of the old farts in the current media world, for my generation it's just the Internet. It revolutionized the way we do everything in life, and while it's odd that the journalism world is so behind, I have to think that eventually it will catch up with the Internet (if the Internet doesn't catch up with it first, that is).

So as I begin to search for jobs for after graduation in May, I'm not shying away from the online positions as I once thought and said I would. And while I suppose everyone will continue reading, writing and discussing the "demise" of print, I can't help but thinking a little vocabulary changing isn't in order here. Perhaps it's not the demise at all, but the reinvention, and hopefully the reinvigoration, of journalism and it's journalists. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Check back with me in 2015 or 2030 and I'll let you know.