*The Integrated Newsroom

5.6 Future-casting

The future of online journalism very much depends on the entire WWW revolution and will be shaped by the way audiences adopt technology as part of their lifestyle. New media will not replace print, radio or television and the market will be redefined. Before TV came about, radio used to air soap operas, thereafter it became a news and music source. Such boundaries and markers will be redefined in the same way that corporations have moved from brochure-ware type of sites to interactive multimedia sites and implemented transactional e-commerce models. There will be a continued focus on personalisation be it in the form of news or any other area and "information content providers" will continue to implement and finetune total e-business. The only certainty lies in the fact that the WWW revolution will continue to evolve.

SPH, Fairfax and other news publishers in the same way will experiment with online news delivery, move away from simple re-purposing of print content to developing extensive "portals", and personalised mobile news through PDAs. They may be capable of delivering news (not just bites of news) by the hour to individuals customised to their needs, if the potential of WAP and CyberDisplay can be realised. Publishers will trial different information retrieval systems and search capabilities to capitalise on the archival nature of the WWW, with a view to developing the ideal mix to boost income and profitability.

"Buckbobbill" as Gentry (Harper 1998, p.48) describes may not be a fallacy. Future journalists will carry wireless devices and transmit news stories directly to the server that converts the content and uploads it online. With WML (Wireless markup language) and WAP, content will be written in WML, driven from WAP sites that can be accessed by phones and no longer limit the used to a desktop or physical space. Audiences will be able to surf and request in menu format what kinds of information they want, and this is not limited to news, leading an integrated lifestyle where users people will read news, trade stocks, order pizza and book a cinema ticket with their phone/PDA. This vision could indeed become reality once bandwidth concerns are resolved.