The prophets of “multimedia” foresee it in many forms. The first would be simple – interactive pay-per-view movies that could decimate the movie rental business. More interesting are packages of text, photos and film that could be used to create customized news products at many different levels of sophistication. At the top end, such a product might contain the text (or spoken text) of a Post story on the big news of the day, accompanied by CNN’s live footage and/or Post photographers’ pictures, plus instantly available background on the story, its principal actors, earlier stories on the same subject, etc. All of this could be read on segments of a large, bright and easy-to-readscreen (screens are also being improved at a great rate).
Robert G. Kaiser, recently appointed managing editor of The Washington Post, in a memo drafted 20 years ago to Washington Post Publisher Don Graham and other top executives after a trip to California to learn more about burgeoning industry in Silicon Valley. Mark Potts writes:
While there, [Kaiser] was invited by John Sculley, then Apple’s CEO, to a conference in Japan about the future of digital media. Several dozen movers and shakers from the worlds of publishing and technology gathered in the resort town of Hakone, outside Tokyo, to discuss what it might mean to use computers to collect and distribute news and information, something described by the newfangled word “multimedia.”
What Kaiser heard at the conference sounded to him—a decidedly non-techie print newsman whose expertise was mostly in international affairs—like science fiction.
The full Kaiser memo is available online now as a PDF.
(Source: recoveringjournalist.typepad.com)
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