What does the future hold?

With the majority of my broadcast friends from KOMU graduating and struggling to find jobs, it has me thinking, "One year from now, what's going to happen? Where will the industry be?"

I am amazed everyday with the resilience of local news and how we continue to try and be better than the competition, try and have our content posted to the web first and find ways to be more transparent and available to our viewers... but that's now, what's going to be the new thing a year from now? I think those easy, vauge questions will be around for a long time, but if you make those questions specific... it's a whole different ballgame.

Take for instance incorporating twitter and having reporters tweet about their stories during the day -- teasing them to attract viewers. That's a recent development in the past 6 months or so, but something ND's all over the country are pushing their reporters to do. But what happens after the twitter phase is over? Nielson released a report saying 60 percent of new twitter users eventually stop using the website after about a month. Are reporters suspectible to the same fate? Will twitter be the same in a year? Two years? Ten years? What will be the new twitter?

And as we continue to converge different mediums onto the web, what happens to the broadcast version of our story? If we've twittered and already written a small story for the web, how do we get our viewers to actually WATCH the story, which maybe burried in an A-block some where? I think these days we continue to emphasize web based publication to attract viewers, but what if by doing this we give them a reason not to watch?

I realize this post is vauge, but with my recent increase in twitter posts and some discussions in my Advanced Internet Class, it has me thinking more and more about the future of journalism.