As a part of the Committee of Concerned Journalists' forum series, this was the second forum to examine the Internet and the future of journalism. The first was held at the University of California at Berkeley in April of 1998 and looked at current developments and trends in the online world. This forum, co-sponsored by the Seattle Times and the University of Washington, went a step further by asking, what will our democracy want and need from journalists in the year 2010 ? How will our world have changed? In what ways can we influence the kind of journalism that will exist?

The idea described by the local organizers was to "end the day either having questioned something that you now think or having a completely new idea about maybe what the future [for quality journalism] is like." At this forum, there was one core group of panelists for the entire day with two hours of small group sessions.

Opening Remarks

Katherine Fulton, Global Business Networks, moderated the entire forum. She set the stage by asking participants to look ten to twelve years into the future of journalism, considering all that will and may have changed by then: A major economic transition the world is going through; attention becoming "the most scarce resource;" and the blurring of boundaries separating information sources:

What we're going to do today is try to look at the pictures of reality that we all have in our heads. The Committee of Concerned Journalists is trying to give journalists a compass, principles, standards, values, that we can use to navigate this new terrain. But we also need a map. What we're going to do today is test our maps.

Foulton displayed a picture from the journalist's perspective of concentric circles that look at things that are increasingly out of our control. In the center, if you're a journalist you have some control over yourself and what you believe and your behavior. Then you go out into the organization, then out into the environment in which you have to work, and all the way out into the political, economic, social and technological environment, over which we have no control, essentially. None. Sometimes a little ability to influence, but certainly no control.

Now for a lot of the mid-century, journalists in important commercial institutions lived in that middle circle and could have the illusion of autonomy from those other circles.

Increasingly, we live in a world in which the boundaries are shredding. If you are working at the Seattle Times now compared to when you were working there 20 years ago, the degree to which you have to go all the way out into the business and contextual environment and alter what you do is increasing.

You can't change the wind in a glider, but you can, in fact, figure out how to steer and how to ride the currents. And those circles outside -- the business environment, contextual environment are the currents that journalists have to learn how to ride in the world ahead.

We're in the midst of a major economic transition from one kind of economy to another that has to do with all of these new digital technologies and the creation of a knowledge economy And we can't know what that next wave is going to look like.

[But] what are some of the characteristics of that next wave? One of my favorite things is to try to imagine ten years out the fact that anybody under 20 years old will never have known a world without the Net. Just like when I was born in 1955, I never knew a world without television. That was strange to my parents. That's the world we're entering into and the world we're going to try to stretch ourselves to understand.

Importantly, attention is the most scarce resource in the world that's getting created. [T]he power is shifting to the people who's attention we desire. And there's growing competition for that attention.

It's hard for me to imagine a world in which we don't have smaller and smaller slices. You can watch the networks losing audience. It doesn't mean there aren't strong, powerful communities and audiences within those slices, but the days of any single network or any single publication having the kind of share of market that they had in the past seems to me to be over. We'll have large temporary audiences around major events the Super Bowl, the Starr Report, but they won't be in any single channel in the way that they've been in the past.

The Net is a tool to save time and money, not just a medium. That's something we'll be really pondering today. What is really new here?

Old boundaries blurring. Do we accept that these things are true? And if we do, the implications are really quite profound.

If you're the Seattle Times, you now face competition from outside your geography in a way that was not true before. You may well have competition from other industries.

If you imagine a place in which we are interacting with information from lots of sources healthcare information, financial information, perhaps education and training Ñ all of that is going to get seamlessly put with journalism in a way that the boundaries between these things are not so clear.

The aging especially of the baby boom generation, the changing ethnic patterns in the country, and the forces of globalization the ways in which we're able to be connected around the world that we weren't before. We'll be playing with what these things mean.

If you go out to 2010, we're looking for that range of plausible futures that we can imagine and agree on. The futures are not necessarily bad or good. They are futures that given those concentric circles we have to live in, and we want to try to find really good futures for journalism in those worlds.

What happens is that you can live in a world in which one or the other of those values is taken to the extreme, and that's the way journalism was constructed for a long time. There were people on the business side who thought totally over there; and people on the editorial side who thought totally up there; and they often met in the middle and fought each other.

The resolution of it, though, was very successful enterprises within which journalism was honored and paid for, and some of those enterprises still exist. There are some of them represented right here in front of us.

But increasingly that resolution of the dilemma, the reason we're here is that that's in jeopardy. So part of what we have to do is try to imagine a new resolution of that dilemma.

Here's a picture of what this looks like from a very smart man named Charles Hampton Turner:

If you're sitting as a business looking up at journalists, that's what you often see. Self righteous lone wolves, out of touch with reality and the changing audience. This is how the battle gets pitched, right?

If you're looking down at the business, you say those people don't have any passion, they don't have any soul, they don't care about quality, and they're going to sacrifice standards and principles. And what happens is, this fight happens in the middle.

Now what we're here today to do is live in that upper corner together. To be explorers and inventors together and say you know what? This is only going to be resolved if we have some new ideas. It was resolved historically because people came up with new ideas. That's how we got the system that we have now.

Up there in that corner, what is quality journalism? How might the information needs of society be met? Not just by journalism, but by other institutions. What is story telling? What are the business models that might support journalism? Will there be advertising or something else? Might journalism play a very different role in the future than we've imagined?

It's not a straight line. It's about experimentation, it's about a push and pull In a way, we're in a fascinating period over the next ten years where that's what it's going to look like, and we can all be part of it if we envision it in that way.

What I want to challenge us to do is not just to critique, not just to complain, not just to worry, but to imagine, to invent. And in the course of that, to create a new mental map, chart a new course for the future together.