Adaptation

Bill Gates had a busy week. With the launching of Microsoft Vista, he toured the news syndicate, and had a lot to say about the future of media as we know it.

“Because TV is moving into being delivered over the Internet—and some of the big phone companies are building up the infrastructure for that—you’re going to have that experience all together,” he told the World Economic forum this week.

Gates explained to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show on Tuesday that within the next five years, TV will be completely revolutionized. He said that TV will be more “interactive”—viewers will soon be able to select what they want to watch, much like an RSS feed for the boob tube.

If you want to just watch the sports segment of a news broadcast, why sit through nation and world news? Just skip ahead to the Australian Open results, he said.

As someone who cares very much about news, this was a little scary to hear. Mostly because I know how I think.

I don’t like to watch TV dramas. CSI: Miami and Law & Order are completely lost on me. I think this is mostly because, at the end of a long day of classes or work, the last thing I want to do is watch people being murdered. I just want to relax, tune out, watch a little Everybody Loves Raymond, and laugh.

So at the end of the day, who is actively going to choose to watch the crime report? Or a feature on famine in Africa? I don’t think I would. It’s such a downer.

The reason why I do watch or read about these kinds of heartbreaking events now is because I can’t avoid them. When I pick up a paper, I automatically see the front page. When I look at a newspaper’s Web site, I can’t avoid the homepage. And when I watch the news on television, I have to watch the A-block before the sports segment. Because now, journalists still get to dictate what news is most important.

With the rise of Tivo and the Internet, audiences have more control over the news than ever before, but they can’t avoid certain stories completely. If Bill Gates gets his way though, journalists will lose one of their vital roles in society. We will no longer be able to set the agenda. Instead, consumers will dictate what news is heard and when—and it might not be the news that we deem to be the most important. Can we trust audiences to make the right choices? Is Bill Gates’ dream the end of news as we know it?

I don’t think so.

I’m an anthropology minor, so I’ve studied evolution for longer than I’d like to admit. And I know that when an environment changes, for the most part, species don’t die out. They evolve. They change in whatever way nature commands, and oftentimes, they’re more successful for it.

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for the New York Times, told the Yale Herald last week that “the Internet has made us more creative and more competitive in many ways.” She’s optimistic about the future of news. She doesn’t think new technology is the end of news, but the beginning. And I agree with her.

I really believe that as long as people talk, they’ll need information. (Otherwise, what will they have to talk about?) And as long as they need information, they’ll need the news.

News may come in different shapes and forms, but that’s what’s so exciting about it. Instead of cringing and the thought of new media and the fear of smaller audiences, maybe we should embrace it, look at it as a challenge and dive in. We should evolve.

Our role, plain and simple, will always be to deliver information. We’ll just have to change the way it gets to our audiences. I’m not sure how we’ll do it, but that’s the beauty of evolution: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.