When he’s not drawing his comic strip Dilbert, Scott Adams types out his offbeat musings on his blog. In a posting on The Future of Newspapers, Adams offers some predictions for how newspapers will evolve. First off, he foresees the traditional print model ending sometime after most people have upgraded the current cell phones two more times, killed off by the enhanced web browsing features that will soon be de rigueur in all mobile phones. Aside from that, It turns out that many of his predictions have already come true. I initially found his proposal that cell phones come with a “Venetian screen” – a scroll that can be pulled out from a phone to provide a larger canvas to make reading digital text more palatable – somewhat fanciful. But then one of the posting’s comments included a link to a device that does exactly that.
Getting down to the more practical level of what will newspaper content be like, Adams also seizes on a number of elements taking place right now with citizen journalism and news ranking sites like Digg and Reddit. According to Adams, the all-digital newspaper of the future will include:
— Social Voting Hybrid: Instead of just passive aggregating of news according to online votes, actual professionals will edit out “the redundant, the juvenile, and the stuff unsubstantiated by facts.. . with “counterpoints to everything.”
— Ad Deal For Blogs: Bloggers should create a system where newspapers “grab their content any time the newspapers want, move it into the newspaper
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