A real-time look at the digital revolution

Maybe it's the start of a new year. Maybe it's that plus the really lousy economy. Maybe it's both of those plus the digital revolution. Whatever the causes, change seems to be coming at a tremendous rate these days to the news media. Just this week The New York Times started putting ads on its front page -- something I never thought we'd see. Just before the end of the new year Detroit's two daily newspapers announced they would soon begin publishing just three days a week.

Most experts I've read recently think 2009 will be full of announcements like that. The Atlantic's Michael Hirschorn got a lot of attention by imagining a time, not far away, when the New York Times might be printed just one day a week -- if that. Steve Yelvington and Martin Langeveld weigh in with their own views of how rapid the change will be this year.

I'll be writing about those changes, and linking to others' thoughts, in this blog as part of a graduate course Geoff Cowan and I are teaching at USC Annenberg this spring. Students will also be doing their own blogs, which we hope will be a combination of original thinking and reporting as well as aggregation of interesting stuff they see.

We're going to be examining both sides of this transition -- the difficulty and decline that afflict mainstream news media like newspapers and television, but also the growth and innovation that are occurring in the digital news world. Here's a good example: Two days before the class begins, a brand new foreign reporting operation, Global Post, will launch. Foreign reporters working for American news organizations have been declining for years. But because of the Internet, Charlie Sennott and other entrepreneurs think they can make money by offering the overseas reporting of more than 60 journalists.

We're also going to be thinking about the impact these changes will have on American democracy. It's not hard these days to find doomsday predictions about what newspapers' economic woes will do to democracy. But I don't think it's all that simple, and I look forward to exploring this in more depth.

This is going to be an unusual course because we'll be studying something that's happening in real time. It's a little scary. It's also hopeful. And it sure is interesting.

ADDENDUM: The Poynter Institute's Rick Edmunds tosses a fast bucket of cold water on Michael Hirschorn's Atlantic piece referenced above. Edmunds says a printless New York Times could come some day, but not anytime soon.