The Beginning of the End of Print_ the Lessons of an Amazingly Prescient 1992 WaPo Memo - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic

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Jordan Weissmann - Jordan Weissmann is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He has written for a number ofpublications, including The Washington Postand The National Law Journal.

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The Beginning of the End of Print: The Lessons of anAmazingly Prescient 1992 WaPo Memo

By Jordan Weissmann

10 Tweet 116 Aug 21 2012, 5:05 PM ET 4

"Our goal, obviously, is to avoid getting boiled as the electronic revolution continues."

(Reuters)

"I am not here dreaming of (or worrying about) a world in which computers have displaced the printed word,

and us too. I could find no one at this conference who would predict the demise of the newspaper. No one. All

saw an important place for us."

Those words come from a remarkable letter written by Robert Kaiser, then the Washington Post's newlyappointed managing editor, to publisher Donald Graham following a 1992 conference on the future of digitalmedia. Kaiser had attended the event after being invited ill-fated Apple CEO John Sculley, flying to Japan inorder to hear from the best contemporary minds in tech and publishing. In the course of his seven-page dispatch,Kaiser accurately predicts the explosion in computing power, growth of multimedia, and shift of readers to theweb that would define the next 20 years of news publishing. It's a truly prescient document. (Disclosure: Iinterned with the Postin 2008.)

Sadly, as the quote up above suggests, what it fails to predict is the large iceberg waiting ahead for newspapers inthe form of collapsing ad revenues. But don't blame Kaiser. What the letter really demonstrates is just how muchharder it can be to predict the future of business and culture than the future of technology.

Just to set the scene for you, when Kaiser was writing his missive, the Internet as we now know it simply didn'texist. At the time, American universities and the federal government were still operating NSFNet, a forerunner tothe modern web, and actual websites were in their infancy. Full-on commercialization of the Internet was still acouple years off. Yet, here are some of the things technologists, and editors like Kaiser with their ears to the

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ground, could already forecast:

Computers would improve exponentially:

At that point [the year 2000] the PC will be a virtual supercomputer, and the easy transmission andstorage of large quantities of text, moving and still pictures, graphics, etc., will be a reality.

We'd be using touchscreens and Siri one day:

The machines he envisioned will have the power to become vastly more user-friendly than today's PC's. They willprobably be able to take voice instructions, and read commands written by hand or an electronic notepad, or right on thescreen. None of this is science fiction -- it's just around the corner.

Old media would turn into new media:

"Multimedia" or "new media" is a popular idea for one possible use of these powerful computersconnected by a fiber optic network....At the top end, such a product might contain the text (orspoken text) of a Post story on the big news of the day, accompanied by CNN's live footage and/orPost photographers' pictures, plus instantly available background on the story, its principal actors,earlier stories on the same subject, etc.

Online was fundamentally different from print:

With this in mind, our electronic Post should be thought of not as a newspaper on a screen, but(perhaps) as a computer game converted to a serious purpose. In other words, it should be acomputer product.

Just for good measure, Kaiser also tosses off the possibility that streaming video would one day kill the brick andmortar movie rental business. It's some great soothsaying. But it's also all predictable, in part, because computingpower is predictable. We have Moore's Law, which tells us that chip performance will double about every twoyears. Companies plan their product lines based on those assumptions. None of this is wild futurism.

What he can't yet imagine are the ways in which the news media's traditional revenue streams will simply

evaporate. Kaiser argues for starting an online classified section. Smart. But eventually, Craigslist will whittledown the price of classifieds to nothing. He argues for trying to sell news online, perhaps through micropayments.But as Mark Potts, one of Washingtonpost.com's founding editors, wrote when he posted Kaiser's letter thisweekend, tech limitations made charging for the site unfeasible. Nobody, meanwhile, could foresee how theweb's ocean of new content would make online advertising an unworkable business model for almost anyoneother than search giants, such as Google.

When it comes to how all of these technological advances will change the way we consume information, Kaiseris even further off the mark. He writes off the idea, for instance, that readers will enjoy "playing editor" by"organizing the information stream around personal needs and preferences to create individualized newspapers."So goodbye Twitter, Facebook feeds, and RSS.

That blindness may have led to true missed opportunities for the news business, though perhaps not the onesyou'd expect. I've never been a believer in the idea that newspapers are being sunk by their content -- that they'renot interactive or social enough. Heck, even Facebook is barely making a go at it with social. Rather, as Pottsnoted Sunday, the Post simply passed on investing in some of the Internet's future giants, including AOL, eBayand Google. Again, seeing the value in those companies required understanding not just what technologyconsumers would have on hand, but how they'd want to use it.

Kaiser led off his letter with the familiar metaphor about frogs in a pot of water. According to a popular myth,frogs' nervous* systems can't feel slight changes in temperature, and so if the temperature rises slowly enough,they'll boil alive.

"The Post is not in a pot of water, and we're smarter than the average frog," Kaiser wrote. "But we do findourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured -- or ignored as an unnecessaryanachronism. Our goal, obviously, is to avoid getting boiled as the electronic revolution continues."

Right now, I think most would agree, they're boiling.


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______________________________*Unaware of the extensive myth busting that's been dedicated to this metaphor -- which still gets used far toooften -- I originally wrote that frog's "supposedly" can't feel slight changes in temperature. I regret the error.

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Jordan, don' t let James Fallows see those last two grafs.

Kaiser led off his letter with the familiar metaphor about frogs in a pot of water.

Paging Jim Fallows....

Somehow, I had never seen his posts on the topic. As my mother would say, a shanda. Also, thank you for pointing it out.

The correct usage: different FROM, not different than.

"the web's ocean *OF* new content"

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The Beginning of the End of Print_ the Lessons of an Amazingly Prescient 1992 WaPo Memo - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic