This is the slide outline from a presentation I gave at an American Press Institute seminar for journalism educators, in Reno, on September 21, 1994. At the time I was Senior Editor / Information Technology at Phoenix Newspapers, and the assignment was to talk to the people teaching the next generation of journalists about what was coming at them.
The opening slide set the tone with what I called the understatement of the decade:
The world of information is changing
And so are the newspapers that provide information
Then the harder question, which I put back to the room rather than answering it myself:
JUST WHAT IS A NEWSPAPER?
WE NEED A DEFINITION FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
Any suggestions?
Much of the middle of the presentation was a tour of the bets newspapers were placing in 1994 — audio services over the telephone, fax editions, CD-ROM, “electronic newspapers” delivered by e-mail to a portable computer, online services, and PDAs. I was blunt about the state of play: some publishers were going online, some were looking at CD-ROM, and “others are putting their head in the sand.” The framing throughout was gambling — place your bets, and then:
WILL ANY OF THESE BETS PAY OFF?
What happens if you lose?
What happens if you don’t play?
The numbers are a good reminder of how early this all was. My online services slide reported that 34% of homes had a personal computer and 13% had a modem, with a forecast that by 1997 the computer number would reach 40-50% but modems would only reach 20%. The named players were CompuServe, America Online, Prodigy and Delphi; the partnership examples were Mercury Center and Access Atlanta; the “future players” I listed were Microsoft, Ziff and Sony. And a slide on why modem penetration might not matter at all — because of “cable boxes that have a computer chips inside.”
Because the audience was educators, the second half turned to jobs and curriculum. I argued that reporters could no longer treat the process of getting the story onto the doorstep as somebody else’s problem, and that they would be gathering content for multiple products. Some of it was deliberately provocative:
Even “hot” jobs may disappear
Do we really need designers?
Coming from someone whose career had been built in newspaper design, that was meant to land. So was the slide on teaching:
HOW DO YOU TEACH THESE NEW SKILLS?
It won’t be from a textbook
My prescription was more connection — “Newsroom and classroom need to get closer / Classroom needs to get real.” Two decades later I was still working on exactly that problem, with News University at the Poynter Institute, trying to close the same gap with online training instead of slides.
The closing section was what I labeled my “vision thing”: that newspapers don’t just provide content, they provide context, and that dumping data isn’t journalism — “If you want data, try the phone book.” I also made the point that newspapers were already interactive:
Newspapers are already interactive
They push content
Readers push back
And the last two slides hold up best of all, in 1994 and in 2026:
Understand that “cutting edge” means “bleeding edge”
Look at workflow, not hardware
Followed by “TECHNO-EVANGELISM / Lead by example / Take an interest.” Substitute today’s technology of the moment for CD-ROM and PDAs and the advice doesn’t need much editing.