صحافة المستقبل ١_a .. كتاب صحافة الغد

Future journalism

There is no doubt that there is an artistic revolution coming to the journalism industry in the next ten years. This revolution will change our current way of thinking, and thus will bring about a change in the publisher, journalist, and reader alike. The great progress achieved by the journalism industry today is considered the beginning of a new era that experts began making plans for, and predicting, the emergence of in the seventies of this century.

The French journalist Serge Bromberger said in a series of investigations published by the newspaper “Le Figaro” about future journalism: “I, Frank Boyd, editor-in-chief of the American “Time” magazine, said while I was sitting in his office on Sixth Street in New York that they have achieved great progress in the fields of transmission and distribution, and nothing has happened. They no longer have only one printing center, but now they have six centers spread throughout the United States. Or in another way, they transfer the edited copy in New York to six printing presses, each of which is a great distance from the other. They use the offset photographic method. Then Frank Boyd accompanied me in front of a device in which luminous letters appear and disappear. As soon as the perforated tape is inserted into this device, he divides it into equal lines. Instead of making letters out of lead, as is common in printing, he photographs these luminous letters that are printed on the film, and they achieve this. On a negative copy of the text (the article), then a copy of this film is sent to each of the six printing centers. Extracting a rehearsal from the film does not require more than half a minute.

Frank told me that he had something else he wanted to tell me. He said this while picking up a typewritten paper that was on his desk. Then he took me to a device, placed the paper on a plate of glass, and closed the lid. After a few seconds, the device brought out an exact copy of the paper. And he said :

(This is not a photograph. The basis of this device is a static electrical process. I could have easily pulled out fifty copies. This device may have been the printing press of tomorrow.)

As for “Newsweek” magazine, it published in the New Inventions section saying: A new method of printing was used by the Newsweek Foundation to print its magazines offset by using the method of television and the electronic mind in letters. This device can collect an entire page of Newsweek in 14 seconds. The process begins by collecting the subject on a device. The hole (perforator) then enters the tape into the electronic mind, which performs the process of adjusting the line and size and dividing the words, and at the same time another device called (VideoComp) reads these lines and writes them at a speed of 600 characters per second on a television screen, line by line. And each of these lines "It is printed on sensitive film, and it comes out in the form of an image instead of traditional lead letters. The price of this device is 170 thousand dollars."

This is what is actually happening today. What does the future hold for us? Experts have imagined the shape of a newspaper in the near future. They created this scene that they imagined in the editorial hall of a newspaper in 1978:

The time may be ten years from today. Negotiations are complex. The printing press has been done for a long time. You are in a newspaper office that is unusually quiet. There were no calls to the couriers who transported copies from one office to another. The pressure and noise in the editorial department were reduced to a minimum, and unfamiliar electronic equipment was placed in strategic places. You are standing in the middle of the production process of a daily newspaper, making full use of electronic brains.

The journalist informant arrives at the house with notes related to the story he was assigned to write about. He may first go to an information station where he uses the electronic brain, and type in a request to obtain summaries of the news published on this subject in the last sixty days. A medium-speed printer (100 to 300 lines per minute) nearby begins chattering, and after a fraction of a minute, summaries of the subject he requested are printed. He quickly scans the summaries and decides which snippets to use. He directs his request again to the inquiry device by means of the mind, and the rapid printing device produces the material he requested. After the informant returns to his office, he begins writing his topic on a typewriter directly connected to the mind, and at the time he writes the topic, the mind turns it into a storage device inside it.

Department heads begin receiving a printed list of news and topics from a low-speed printer located in their area. There is a television-like display device in front of each department head, on which the department head can request a copy of what the laboratory has prepared. The copy appears on the screen in front of him, and he begins the process of correcting, canceling, or reformulating parts of the copy, by writing (with a light electronic pen) on the face of the screen. And when. His task is to determine the type of letter and the size using a key, then press the send key. The story or news is then sent to the mind, and it goes through the process of connecting words and adjusting spacing and lines. A perforated strip of paper comes out of a perforated device in the assembly hall. The tape is then automatically distributed to a machine of a series of type-casting machines, which contains the type of letters with which the copy is to be compiled. This is then followed by the process of reading the proofs to correct them and organizing the page:

The central brain contains a program that can cancel the reviewer's instructions regarding the size of letters. And then if . If the required letters are larger than necessary, the mind can, on its own, make the necessary changes to create a copy that is correct in size and appropriate.

Lawrence Fanning, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Daily News, gave a lecture about Al-Ghad newspaper at the Institute of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin in America, in which he said:

If you visit the editorial hall of Al-Ghad newspaper, you will not find it difficult to find the leadership staff there. It will be surrounded on all sides by screens resembling television screens, and the editors will be sitting at a small table on which there are various buttons and a set of typewriter keys, and in their hands - and sometimes behind their ears - a thin tube resembling An accurate electronic torch, which is an electronic pen that they use to write out. Half an hour before the issuance of the first edition, an important incident occurs. At the same time that the editor-in-chief receives news of this incident by telephone from abroad, the head of the department first and foremost writes the news on a machine: the typewriter. The text is recorded in the electronic center, which absorbs all the news that reaches it throughout the day and stores it. On magnetic tapes in the mind's memory, and at the same time the text appears on one of the screens placed in front of the head of the news department. By turning a dial similar to a telephone dial, the head of the news department or... Editor-in-Chief, from the electronic archive of the newspaper, Ali. What can be published on this topic with a list of existing pictures. All of this appears on screens or in the form of texts that are automatically printed on the editorial office.

The editor-in-chief decides the appropriate place for this news depending on its importance, the department head begins preparing the final text, and the editorial secretary measures and cuts the pictures, then presses a button and they are displayed on the screen. At this moment, a contradiction appears between the archive information and that reported by the informant, and the informant is contacted and asked to verify the news. The editor-in-chief determines the size of the title and letters, and displays the text on the screen of the editorial secretary, who reads it and sets the title. When the editorial secretary finishes this work, he presses a button and the title appears on the editor-in-chief’s screen, but the editor-in-chief does not like this title, so he presses an electronic button to return it to the editorial secretary’s screen, who gives his boss a non-electronic but expressive look and rewrites the title.

The editor-in-chief decides what can be done to improve the appearance of the page. He draws a circle on the layout screen, then presses a button and the image disappears. Then he asks for another copy and finally decides that the previous one was better, so he presses another button and it reappears. While the head of the news department takes a look at the topics on the front page, and decides to delete an economic topic, the head in charge of this place protests to no avail, as he is too weak to resist the automatic mechanism, and loses the match like his predecessor. There are now only a few minutes left for the edition to be released. The editor-in-chief turns a button to re-appear the newspaper pages on his screen. Finally, he presses a button with the word “print” written on it. Until this moment, the entire edition had not had a physical existence, but once the “print” button was pressed, the pages became a reality.

Then the head of the news department leaves his place and heads to the cafeteria, where he is presented with a copy of his newspaper. It was actually distributed in the streets adjacent to the newspaper’s location, and it was also distributed in the suburbs surrounding the place, where rotating printing machines also responded to the signal of the print button. “And it will be distributed at this hour in other cities and regions, and perhaps also after passing through electronic minds for translation, in distant countries.

The elements of this imaginary device exist now, and types of it are actually used in some army formations and information offices, and they use them for purposes very close to our purposes, which are collecting, editing, and distributing information. . . »

There is great potential for the future proposed by these experts, as each element of these devices is based on technological innovation.

French journalist Barr and Berger asked a question to the director of the Newspaper Publishers Association, saying to him: “Unlike a newspaper that has multiple printing centers, which would actually be a possible step, what do you think of a newspaper that is written and transported to the home using electromagnetic waves?” )

The association's director replied, "It depends on knowing what a newspaper is. Publishers who belong to the American Newspaper Publishers Association do not feel any interest in a method of publishing of this nature."

In fact, in the eyes of American publishers and perhaps also in the eyes of many others, the idea of ​​the newspaper is related to the idea of ​​printed paper and they do not seem interested.