This is a presentation I gave to the Centre for Journalism and Further Education on Sept. 23, 2002. The opening slide greets the audience with “God Eftermiddag,” so I was clearly speaking to a Danish room. At the time I was Managing Director of Finberg-Gentry, the Digital Futurist Consultancy, a Presidential Scholar at The Poynter Institute and a Senior Fellow at the American Press Institute’s Media Center.
The purpose, as I laid it out early on, was to help the audience think about the future: how journalism is shaped by technology, how consumers drive technology, and how journalists need to position themselves regarding technology. My argument was that journalists could no longer treat technology as somebody else’s department.
For decades, journalists had little reason to pay attention to technology… The pace of change was slow. 50 years between innovations. Hot type to cold type. Letterpress to offset. Today, the pace is much faster. 20 years or shorter…
I split the disruption into two buckets. Internal: how we do business. External: what is our business. And I was blunt that the external questions mattered more, because our industry was at what I called an “inflection point.” I leaned on the Marshall McLuhan line that has never stopped being useful:
“We see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Much of the middle of the talk was a tour of devices and delivery: broadband going mainstream in the U.S. and accelerating in Western Europe, information devices wired and wireless, the smart phone as “a telephone with an operating system,” the first generation of reading devices — Softbook, E-Reader, RocketBook — plus NewsStand and Zinio, the coming TabletPC from “those fun folks up in Redmond, Wash.,” home gateways, personal video recorders, IBM’s MetaPad, the OQO, E-Ink displays and IBM’s e-newspaper mockup. I also included my caveat that not all technological changes are valuable, and that convergence might be an example of value that isn’t clearly understood.
Woven through the slides were five questions for the audience, and the third one is the one I’d still ask today:
While the paper might not disappear from newspaper, what happens if those who read it on paper disappear?
The last third of the presentation was the part I cared most about: a method for deciding what to do. The Technology Prioritization Matrix, copyrighted by The Digital Futurist Consultancy, simplified the decision to two criteria — consumer value, and expense and effort — with a list of internal questions (productivity, training, skills alignment, probability of success) and external ones (revenue potential, market share, customer adoption). The point was that not every project with a “gee whiz” factor returns value to the consumer or the company, and that there would be no single leap to the new world. I closed with four technology rules, including one I’ve repeated many times since:
Experiments cost money; doing nothing costs even more
Reading this in 2026, the specific hardware is a museum tour — most of those reading devices are gone, and the ones that survived didn’t look much like the mockups. But the framing held up better than the gadgets: consumers drove the fundamental changes, adoption took longer than predicted, and the newsrooms that waited for certainty paid the higher price.