A Role For Papers In A High- Tech Age   

Their ability to collect and organize data will be critical on the information superhighway.

The electronic information superhighway that is supposed to enter every home in the next few years tends to strike fear in the hearts of newspaper people.
After all, if everybody in every home in America can call up on a computer screen or television set every detail of news, advertising and anything else that comes to mind, what role will be left for newspapers?

The answer is, quite a lot. Before exploring the answer, though, it is worthwhile assessing what is going on.

In recent weeks there has been a plethora of stories about numerous alliances among communications companies of all types and what they portend for readers, television watchers and shoppers. Involved in the scramble for stretches of the electronic superhighway are telephone companies, cable television companies, movie producers, long distance telephone companies, cellular telephone companies, newspapers and even electric utilities (after all, theyÕre wired into everybody).
Some deals have been done, some are being fought over, and more are sure to come. What has become clear is that creating the electronic superhighway as a business is likely to involve only giant combines of huge companies. There will be no room for small players.

Fueling most of the alliance efforts are the desires of regional telephone companies and large cable television operators to expand their franchises. The telephone companies now are restricted by court order to specific regions; they may not compete as telephone companies beyond their home states. Thus they view alliances with cable companies as a way to extend their customer base, offering cable customers long distance and other services through the cable.
Similarly, cable companies seek to expand their customer bases beyond the local franchises they have bought or won through negotiations with local governments by sending television programming to telephone company customers over phone lines.

For these alliances to work, the telephone companies will have to invest in fiber optics since current telephone lines do not have sufficient capacity for the 500 channels the superhighway will have, and the cable companies will have to complete their ongoing conversion to fiber optics. Industry insiders predict it will take four to seven years to complete the conversions.

Newspapers will have an important role on the electronic superhighway for two reasons. One is that the newspaper industry now is wholly converted to computers. Its information output, right up to the pressroom, is digitizedÑa perfect fit for the electronic superhighway.
The second reason is that only newspapers collect and organize news on a mass basis, and there is likely to be a big demand for this information as the superhighway operators fill up their 500 channels. Newspaper skills in editing and organizing the mass flow of information into a variety of electronic formats likewise will be invaluable.

The creation of the superhighway also may begin the permanent transfer of some newspaper information away from newsprint to electronic delivery. The most likely candidate for early electronic transfer are the three to five pages of stock quotes that newspapers carry each day. Electronic delivery would assure that each reader gets timely information on a handful of stocks of interest. Many newspapers already offer a touch-tone telephone service that accomplishes this.
Another sizable part of a newspaper especially adaptable to electronic distribution is classified advertising, which can take up two to three pages in small newspapers and as many as 30 or more in large ones.

Will newspapers ever be delivered entirely electronically, saving the industry hundreds of millions in mechanical production, newsprint and delivery costs? Perhaps some day, but this kind of dramatic change must await development of higher definition video receivers. The picture tubes now in use have sufficient definition for images, but reading lengthy presentations of text is wearing on the eyes and nerves. Development of high definition television could offer a solution, but the compromises that have been agreed to for compatibility with existing technology indicate that its definition will not be sufficient for newspaper text.

Instead, the wholly electronic newspaper (and magazine) of the future probably will need a flat-panel display capable of showing text with clarity equal to what a laser printer produces (see ÒThe Future is Now,Ó October). Such flat panels are under development, but we are not likely to see practical applications until well into the next century.

However rapidly the electronic superhighway in all its forms comes about, the important point for newspapers is that their function will continue to be valuable and needed. In effect, newspapers will become software providers, and as has been demonstrated in the computer business, it is the software providers who prosper most in the long run. l