News futurist prophesied air traffic failure 8 years ago
Eight years ago media futurist Kerry Northrup of Ifra, a newspaper technology organization based in Germany, produced a visionary video anticipating a world of media convergence – imagined then to be a world of big media companies distributing news and information on multiple platforms: web, on-demand print, mobile, broadcast. The video was ingenious on many levels, including coming up with the term E-lancer to describe the multi-talented grunt, non-staff contract reporter who could spit out video, mobile alerts and web reports without batting an eye.
That vision of convergence – including a harmonious, silky-smoothe newsrooms staffed by two people – didn’t anticipate the emergence of social media or citizens gathering and distributing news independent of big media, through blogs, camera phones and services like Twitter. But it did include a sophisticated vision of how distributed professional news teams could collaborate and react quickly to serve and inform audiences on whatever devices they preferred to use. That was a radical idea for most print-obsessed newspapers eight years ago.
The video was also prophetic: its story was based on a massive air traffic computer failure. That’s what happened today.
