Wire: Death of Newspapers by 2022, says Leading Media Futurist

Sydney, Australia (Inquisitr Wire): “By 2022 newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant in Australia,” says leading media futurist Ross Dawson. “However the leading newspaper publishers of today may have transformed themselves to thrive in what will be a flourishing media industry,” he says.

Dawson is giving the closing keynote at the Newspaper Publishers Association’s Future Forum in Sydney on 26 August. Dawson’s global reputation as a prescient futurist was established by his acclaimed 2002 book Living Networks, in which he wrote about social networking and micro-blogging many years before Facebook or Twitter existed.

Topics that Dawson will cover in his speech to Newspaper Publishers Association include:

• Media revenues will soar but will be unevenly distributed. We are shifting to a “media economy” dominated by content and social connection. Yet established media organisations will need to reinvent themselves to participate in that growth.

• The successors to the iPad will be our primary news interfaces. Australians will most commonly consume news on portable devices, of which the iPad will be recognised as the forerunner.

• Digital news readers will cost less than $10. By 2020 entry-level devices to read the news will cost less than $10 and often be given away. More sophisticated news readers will be foldable or rollable, gesture controlled and fully interactive.

• Journalism will be increasingly crowdsourced. Substantial parts of investigative journalism, writing and news production will be ‘crowdsourced’ to hordes of amateurs overseen by professionals.

• The reputation of individual journalists will drive audiences. Many journalists, most leading experts in their fields, will still be employed in Australia, with public reputation measures guiding audiences on how much to trust their work.