Smart Journalism

When professor Vadim Isakov guest spoke in our class yesterday about emerging new technologies trends, I couldn't but think of the Disney Channel movie Smart House. When the movie was released ten years ago, the idea of a house run by an internal computer system seemed little more than cool science fiction. Today it seems a very possible reality.

Professor Isakov talked about nine new technology trends: real-time Web, lightblogging, personalization, interactive TV, identity recognition, augmented reality, mobile life, geolocation, and an internet of things. Many of these trends entail tailoring media to your specific needs, be it finding the nearest pizza place by a voice command on your phone or ordering Pam's outfit with a click of the remote as you're watching The Office. Other trends facilitate life on the go: QR codes on cell phones that act as boarding passes and the ability to verbally dictate a blog post via your cell phone. Still others, like Roomba vacuums that run automatically, are robots that perform pesky human chores.

I particularly liked Professor Isakov's response to the question of whether all this new technology eliminates the need for journalists. "If you define a journalist as someone who gathers information, you don't need journalists anymore," he said. However, he immediately added that we continue to need analysis, explanation and fact-checking.

Journalists' jobs are certainly changing, but they remain crucial. They are evolving from information gatherers to information synthesizers and most importantly, analysts. As my high school teachers used to say, "A monkey can copy text from the book. I want you to tell me what it means."

Furthermore, the best journalistic writing has personality to it. It has sass. Humor. Attitude. It's littered with pop culture references. A computer or robot can be programmed to compile facts, but the end result will lack creativity and anecdotal evidence. It will be a fact sheet rather than a story.

Robots will not oust journalists from their jobs, but they may improve certain parts of the journalistic process. Personally, I'd love a gadget that would automatically transcribe all my interviews from my recorder onto my laptop. Anyone want to invent that?