On Nov. 17th, MPR aired “The Future of Journalism,” a program that hoped to discuss concepts of media both new and old while exploring the possibilities of the future. Host Carrie Miller’s main question for the hour was “How will investigative journalism look in the future?” Miller’s question was directed at guests Tom Rosensteil from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune. Both guests’ stable positions in the media make their viewpoints less likely to be skewed by the need for survival or the threat of their business being made irrelevant.

Smith posits that the role of the journalist is moving farther away from the old metaphor of “gatekeeper” to the “keeper of the aviary.” What he means is that imminence of social media in today’s journalism media has made “tweeting” and forwarding top stories on social media like Facebook the primary means of news consumption.

“Custom news landscapes” is a concept the program attempts to describe without presenting biased paranoid implications. Of course today everyone has the capability to decide what he or she would like to consume in the news. Newspapers worked the same way. With digital media there is simply more information to comb through, which allows people to “hunt and gather” as Rosenstiel claims. This hunter/gatherer concept of news has made news organizations more specialized, as speculated by Smith who, despite his proximity to the recent Fort Hood shooting, decided not to send a single reporter. Instead he aggregated the breaking news as he always does on his site from CNN. Smith stood firm with his stance as a “Politics and Issues” newspaper, as he defined the Texas Tribune, and stood out of the way of the big news organizations who would undoubtedly have the means to cover the story in a more thorough way.

The concept of “custom news” is also furthering the importance of individual journalists, who have taken an absurd role as living movable monuments in the media today. Just watch the TV coverage of the 20-year anniversary of unified Germany. The anniversary and celebration was not news enough by itself, so I watched Tom Brokaw stand split screen with himself 20 years ago, while both of them talked simultaneously in the present and past tenses. Which was more important, the end of an awful era in German history or the fact that Brokaw was there to break the news? NBC had 20 years to think about it, and they sided with Brokaw. Is this the result of blog culture? The result of “personalized content?”
The problem with personalized news was addressed by a 25-year-old caller who speculated that a lot of people her age ignore the news because it is “too negative.” This begs the question­—what is on this type of person’s “personalized newspaper”? Is the digital news world enabling people who are addicted to avoidance? Conceivably I could create a page of news that specializes in golden retriever puppy and duckling love and be the world’s preeminent expert on soft news. Since the “news landscape” is now customizable, points of view will become much more static while they are reinforced daily by the assurances of custom news stories we choose to read.

No longer can people assume that I’m informed enough to get into an intelligent conversation about the alleged Ampatuan clan massacre of government officials in the Philippines. Instead they’ll have to subscribe to my Twitter page and discover that I’m more interested in how Lou Dobbs is trying to reconcile with Latinos in order to allegedly run for president. And we’ll discuss the allegations, just like the good old days in our little aviary.

Everyone on “The Future of News” agrees that journalism has to change in order to accommodate a new culture with new demands on the industry. I would take this fact further and argue that the necessity of being an informed (albeit bummed out) citizen is now our responsibility, which is exciting. For us normal, concerned, and empathetic human beings the proactive nature of digital news’ “hunting and gathering” gives us the opportunity to explore different points of view that wouldn’t have permeated the editorial or even letters to the editor columns in newspapers.