There are two things that journalism must figure out in order to move forward: its place in the new economic environment, and its place in the new technology environment. But what will the new technology environment be?
Many experts who analyze technology and predict its course see a "singularity" in our future, a point at which, according to Ray Kurzweil, "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. We will combine our brain power-the knowledge, kills, and personality quirks that make us human-with our computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today."
What would journalism be in this environment? It's already drowning in technology, and the pace of development is still, according to Kurzweil and others, relatively slow.
Would there be a need for journalism in this future? If we are to synthesize our brains with computing power, all information anywhere on the internet would be accessible to anyone at any moment.
I believe that there will still be a need for people or machines that observe physical phenomena directly and record it and make sense of it in as unbiased a way as possible. Journalism is the project of making cultural sense of spacio-temporal events without an agenda; if nothing and no one undertakes this project, then all the "information" in the world will do no one any good; the internet will be a stew of opinions, outright lies, misinformation, good information, and information directly from the source with nothing that discriminates between these things.
Information accessibility alone is not good enough, because information can be wrong. Maybe we can make journalist-computers. But the future must find a way to ensure that the information we have access to and believe to be accurate and reliable actually is.
