LCD: no transistors, no polarizers, no color filters, no backlighting. Without these power-and space-hungry features, Yaniv's screens can achieve higher density of pixels at far lower energy use. This adds up to far higher resolution at milliwatts of power (rather than 20 watts) and at far higher manufacturing yields, and thus far lower cost. Yaniv predicts screens with laser-printer resolution and with contrast higher than paper, costing between $1 and $2 per square inch (compared with around $10 for current active-matrix devices). That means 8-1/2-by-11-inch tablets for $100 to $200 in manufacturing cost, well under Fidler's target price.
Still an R&D project in an intensely competitive industry, ATI may not have all the answers, but it points the way to a solution. Within the next three or four years, a portable tablet with laser-printer resolution and contrast and with hundreds of megabytes of solid-state or hard disk memory will be purchasable for an acceptable price. Fat Panel's tablet is not merely a toy; it is the token of a technology that will sweep the world.
NEWS ON THE NET
Meanwhile, precusor solutions are being rolled out on personal computers, Newtons, Zoomers and other personal digital assistants. Already collecting and transmitting copy in digital form, reporters and editors could just as well provide digital content to all the other platforms that are emerging in the 1990s, from tiny portable personal communications services to supercomputer knowledge bases.
Also empowering the newspaper industry will be the exploding new world of boundless bandwidth or communications power in both the atmosphere and the fibersphere (see Forbes ASAP, December 7, 1992, and March 29, 1993). One of the most difficult concepts for many business planners to grasp is the onset of bandwidth abundance: the idea that the electromagnetic spectrum is not scarce but nearly limitless. The text of a daily newspaper takes up about a megabyte; a hundred or so black-and-white photographs take up about 100 megabytes; 25 color photos could run another 100 megabytes, or even a gigabyte, depending on resolution. Video clips would take about 100 megabytes apiece. With just 500 megabytes, you could throw in the entire "MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour."
Summing it all up, the total bit-cost of a paper, including video-rich ads, might be comparable to that of a two-hour movie_perhaps two gigabytes with compression. Two gigabytes can be transmitted in a second down fiber-optic lines, in perhaps 10 seconds down a gigahertz cable connection, and in perhaps a matter of three or four minutes down a twisted-pair copper line equipped with Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop (ADSL) technology, Amati Corp.'s amazing new phone-company access system. From Digital Equipment Corp. and Zenith to Hybrid Technologies and Continental Cablevision, several firms are demonstrating impressive ways to use cable lines for two-way digital data transmission at a rate of 10 megabits a second or more, which would fill up a two-gigabyte newspanel in just over three minutes. Electrical power companies also are laying fiber along with their power lines. All these pipes are little used for long hours of the night and could be employed to deliver newspapers.
Complementing this web of wires will be wireless methods of delivery. Cellular technology is moving toward a code division multiple access (CDMA) protocol that allows use of the entire spectrum every mile or so, and toward millimeter wave frequencies that offer gigahertz of capacity. Again, access to these systems might be expensive on a demand basis, but a newspaper can be sent whenever space or time is available. Delivery of the basic paper through wires and fiber and delivery of short updates and extras via the air would be optimal. Whatever electronic or photonic techniques are used, the laws of the microcosm and telecosm ordain that distribution of newspapers will become vastly cheaper, more efficient and more timely than their present methods: trucks and bicycles.
THE "DOMONETICS" OF THE WORD
The future of newspapers will not depend on technology alone, however. The ultimate strength of the "press" comes not from its machinery but from its "domonetics"_a word that describes an institution's cultural sources and effects.
Judeo-Christian scripture declares that in the beginning was the word. There is no mention of the image. Today in information technology, the word still widely prevails. In 1992, trade publications, newspapers and magazines alone generated some $73 billion in sales, compared with television revenues of $57 billion.
In general, images are valuable as an enhancement to words. As Robert Lucky of Bellcore has pointed out, images are not in themselves usually an efficient mode of communication. In his definitive work "Silicon Dreams," just released in a new paperback edition, Lucky writes that after an evening of television, "we sink into bed, bloated with pictorial bits, starved for information."
People who gush that a picture is worth a thousand words usually fail to point out that it may well take a million computer "words" to send or store it. Written words are a form of compression that has evolved over thousands of years of civilization. In a multimedia encyclopedia, such as Microsoft's Encarta, some 10,000 images take up 90 percent of the bits, but supply perhaps one-100th of the information. With the pictures alone, the encyclopedia is nearly worthless; with the words alone, you still have a valuable encyclopedia. Most of the work and the worth are in the words. Supremely the masters of words, newspapers can add cosmetic pictures, sounds and video clips far more easily than TV or game machines can add reporting depth, expertise, research and cogent opinion.
More profoundly, the domonetics of the new technologies strongly favors text-based communications. Video is most effective in conveying shocks and sensations and appealing to prurient interests of large miscellaneous audiences. Images easily excel in blasting through to the glandular substrates of the human community; there's nothing like a body naked or bloody or both to arrest the eye and forestall the TV zapper.
TV news succeeds because of timeliness and vividness. Compared with TV imagery, news photos tend to be late and lame. Nonetheless, for all its power and influence, broadcast television news is a dead medium, awaiting early burial by newspapers using new technologies.
The TV news problem is summed up by the two-minute rule_the usual requirement that, short of earthquake or war, no story take more than two minutes to tell. This rule even applies to the epitome of broadcast news_CNN. It is entirely a negative rule. The reason for it is not that the audience desires no more than two minutes of coverage of stories of interest. On any matter deeply interesting to the viewer, two minutes is much too little.
The rationale for the two-minute rule is that the viewer will not tolerate more than two minutes of an unwanted story. Its only function is to forestall the zapper, but its effect is to frustrate any viewer with more than a superficial interest in a story. Increasingly it reduces TV news to a kaleidoscope of shocks and sensations, portents and propaganda, gossip and titillation.
The new technologies, however, put individual customers in command. Making their own first choices among scores of thousands of possibilities, individuals eschew the hair-trigger poise of the channel surfer. Narrowcasting allows appeal to the special interests and ambitions, the hobbies and curiosities, the career pursuits and learning needs of particular individuals. Thus, the new media open up domonetic vistas entirely missed by mass media.
At the domonetic elevation of newspapers, images are supplementary, not primary. The new technologies thus favor text over pure video because text_enhanced by graphics where needed_is by far the best (and digitally most efficient) way to convey most information and ideas. Where graphics are overwhelmingly more efficient than alphanumerics_as in visualization of huge bodies of data or statistics_the newspanel can supply true computer graphics and simulations. Interactivity, after all, is the computer's forte.
THE $700 MILLION INCENTIVE As early as 1981, Fidler saw and predicted that computer technology using flat-panel screens would allow the newspaper business to eliminate much of its centralized manufacturing and printing plant and much of its distribution expenses, and deliver the product directly to the customer at half the cost. He saw that this process would jeopardize neither the branded identity nor the editing functions nor the essential character of the paper. The distribution of intelligence would simply permit the customer rather than the newspaper to supply the display and the printer. This microcosmic shift would drastically simplify and improve the accessibility and worth of the information, enhancing the value of newspaper archives and other resources. This step could theoretically save Fidler's employer, Knight-Ridder, some $700 million, or between half and two-thirds of its current costs.
Fidler's vision is just as promising for magazines. In effect, his concept allows newspapers to combine the best features of daily journalism with the best qualities of specialty magazines. The front pages and shallower levels of the system will still function like a streamlined newspaper, which readers can browse, search and explore as they do a conventional paper without thrashing about through the pages. The deeper levels will function like magazines, focusing on business, technology, lifestyles, sports, religion or art. Indeed, to exalt their offerings into an ever richer cornucopia, news systems will want to collaborate with magazines, just as they often distribute magazines today with their Sunday papers.
THE SOUL OF THE NEW MEDIUM
In addition, electronic magazines can excel newspapers in providing a sense of community through interaction with other readers and authors in new kinds of dynamic letters, bulletin boards and classified sections. In a sense, the news panel never ends. Beyond its offering of news, articles and archives, it opens into new dimensions of interactivity.
As Stephen Case puts it: "Everybody will become information providers as well as consumers. The challenge is to create electronic communities that marry information and communications_thereby creating an interactive, participatory medium. This community aspect is crucial_it is the soul of the new medium."
The most practical current vessel for this expansion of the press is Case's own company, America Online, a supplier of an icon-based interface and gateway to scores of "infobases" and bulletin boards in Vienna, Va., outside the District of Columbia. Ten percent owned by the Tribune Co. of Chicago, eight percent controlled by Apple, allied with Knight-Ridder and providing access to such journals as the New Republic, National Geographic, Time and Macworld, America Online has uniquely focused on the vital center of the new market: the point of convergence of newspapers, magazines and computers in new communities of interest and interaction.
Following this strategy, America Online has invested just $20 million (one-100th the capital of Prodigy) and devoted half the time, to achieve nearly one-third the customer base and generate strong profits, in contrast to huge estimated losses on the part of IBM and Sears. Prodigy is now paying AOL the high tribute of imitation, making deals with Cox Enterprises Inc. and its 17 newspapers, and with Times-Mirror. Perhaps most audacious in pursuing this vision, however, is Murdoch's News Corp. Ltd., which recently purchased Delphi Internet Services Corp., the only on-line service with full Internet access to home PC users. Delphi already offers an array of news programs and special-interest conferences, including a popular computer news show led by moderator Jerry Pournelle that provides interactive dialogs on everything from abstruse computer features to science fiction. Pournelle and some 300 other conference moderators can function like editors in cyberspace.
Internet is the global agglomeration of data networks that has emerged from the original Pentagon research network called ARPANET. Growing at some 15 percent a month for several years to a current level of 10 to 20 million users, Internet has bifurcated into linked commercial and research nonprofit divisions. As John Evans, president of News Corp.'s Electronic Data, puts it, explaining the Delphi purchase: "Internet is like a giant jellyfish. You can't step on it. You can't go around it. You've got to go through it." Delphi now plans to go through it using much quicker access systems, including cable.
Evans declares that these new collaborations between News Corp. and Internet will "put the 'me' back into media." His concept, also shared by Nicholas Negroponte's Media Lab and Apple Computer's Knowledge Navigator, is an automated news database ultimately supplying the customer with a personal paper filtered from floods of daily information by an agent programmed to pursue your own interests. In Fidler's view, however, these digital papers will succeed only to the extent that they transcend this vision of the Daily Me.
Fidler prefers the vision of a Daily Us, shaped by human editors rather than by electronic agents or filters. According to Fidler, the law of the microcosm will put so much intelligence and storage in the tablet that the individual can personalize the "paper" every day in a different way. If, as Case puts it, the soul of the new medium is community, the reader will want to begin in a particular context, a specially favored "place" in the world of information, a place with a brand name and identity: a newspaper.
THE COMPUTER IMPERATIVE
Above all, the key to the special advantage of newspapers in the new era is their great good fortune in being forced to focus on computers. It should be evident by now to everyone in the information business that the energy, the creativity, the drive, the gusto, the pulse, the catalyst of this industry is computers. The magic is in the microcosm of solid-state electronics (doubling the density of components on a chip every 18 months) and in the concentric circles of enterprise and invention that surge outward from this creative core: the some 5,000 software firms, the thousands of manufacturers of chips, peripherals, printed circuit boards and add-on cards; the double-digit annual expansion in the armies of computer scientists and software engineers; the ever growing millions of PC owners devoting their creative energies and passions to this intoxicating machine.
What the Model T was to the industrial era-the teenage training board, the tinkerer's love and laboratory, the technological epitome-the PC is to the Information Age. Just as people who rode the wave of automobile technology -- from tiremakers to fast-food franchisers -- prevailed in the industrial era, so the firms that prey on the passion and feed on the force of the computer community will predominate in the information era.
Why, then, are so many apparently ambitious and visionary executives shrinking from the central arena to play around on the fringes with TVs and game machines? Why are American computer executives standing silently aside while the so-called U.S. Grand Alliance for the Future of Advanced Television, so-called digital HDTV, adopts an interlaced screen technology that is fundamentally hostile to computers?
For images, the human eye cannot tell the difference between interlaced and progressively scanned displays. But interlace poses endless problems for text and multimedia. Apart from Zenith, the American leaders in the Grand Alliance are AT&T, General Instrument Corp., MIT, Sarnoff Laboratories and GE-NBC. All but MIT capitulated to pressure from foreign TV interests such as Sony, Thomson Corp. and Philips Electronics to betray the American computer and newspaper industries by adopting a display scheme unsuited for the multimedia and text programs central to the next computer revolution.
Without text and multimedia capabilities, high-resolution images can open virtually no markets not already served by current "digitally enhanced" improved-definition television displays. Limiting the teleconferencing market, for example, is not the resolution of the screens but the bandwidth of the network. Without computer capabilities, digital TV is likely to be a large disappointment.
Claiming to set a standard that can survive deep into the next century, the Grand Alliance is focusing on short-term economies for manufacturing TVs tomorrow. These executives are all missing the point and the promise of the era in which they live. The Information Age is not chiefly about kicks and thrills, offering games for kids and so-called dildonics for "adults." Markets for educational programs and on-line information services are already growing much faster than game markets. In 1992 in the computer business, according to the Software Publishers Association, entertainment software revenues rose some 29 percent to a level of $342 million. Educational software for the home rose some 47 percent to $146 million. Meanwhile, sales of computers with modems are rising at about 1,000 percent a year, hugely faster than the sales of TVs. Online services like America Online and Prodigy have been growing almost 500 percent per year since 1988. According to current projections based on microprocessor CPU sales, some 50 million PCs may be sold over the next 12 months, and perhaps three-quarters of them will contain either on-board modems or networking systems.
The ultimate reason that the newspapers will prevail in the Information Age is that they are better than anyone else at collecting, editing, filtering and presenting real information, and they are allying with the computer juggernaut to do it. The newspapers are pursuing the fastest expanding current markets rather than rearview markets. They are targeting adults with real interests and ambitions that generate buying power rather than distracting children from more edifying pursuits. In the computer age, follow the microcosm and you will find the money, too.