By Rick Edmonds
Poynter.org
Soon after Thursday’s announcement that Editor & Publisher will close, Poynter librarian David Shedden popped into my office with the trade magazine’s tome-like 100th anniversary edition, circa March 1984. “You might find this interesting,” David said.
Indeed. For a start, it looked at a glance like the estimable E&P Yearbook — 370 perfect-bound pages, chock full of ads, not at all like the slim-line monthly we have been seeing lately.
For the occasion, the editors had commissioned a back page essay by Leo Bogart, the industry’s leading researcher and thinker at the time, titled “Newspapers in 2084.”
Well, it isn’t 2084 yet, but an astonishing amount of what Bogart predicted has come to pass. As a modest tribute to E&P at its best, here is an extended sampler.
“There will be newspapers in 2084,” Bogart opened, “but they will be quite different from those of today in an age of vastly expanded communications resources.”
He predicted an assortment of social changes, Notably: “With a growing population of vigorous older people, the definitions of work and leisure will be blurred. The relationship between home and the workplace will be different, as home communications systems allow more personal business, shopping and work activity to take place at home.”
In Bogart’s future people would be flying around with ease (other futurists got that one wrong, too) and “the wrist-watch picturephone is a commonplace.”
More to the point, “The functions of all existing media will be transformed by the development of artificial intelligence, of two-way interactive linkages, and of ready access to vast amounts of stored information and entertainment. Not only will individuals be able to get what they want when they want it, but advertisers will be readily able to identify the individuals or households at whom they want to aim their messages.”
So what would all that mean for newspapers?. . .READ FULL STORY and SEE ALL 12 PREDICTIONS
