More glamour and immediacy. Less depth. These are the likely hallmarks of a new generation of digital news reporters.
They will transmit every detail of their daily life, including the tiny details they poke into your line of sight via Twitter.com, Pownce.com and similar new online and mobile services. They will broadcast their interviews - but also their lives intertwining with the rich, powerful and famous - via video captured directly by their cellphone using qik.com-style services. This will mean less analysis and shorter stories.
It will usher in an era of instantaneity and unprecedented linkage of reporter/commentators with each member of their audience.
International bureaus run by organisations such as CNN are already becoming one person operations and there are likely to be more bureau closures and consolidations particularly in the Australian media as time goes by. But changes in news gathering are only one factor driving these trends. Also important are changes in news consumption.
Mobile devices such as the iPhone push news alerts deeper and more frequently into people's lives. Checking for small chunks of new information - delivered via RSS or Twitter - has become a compulsion for some people, catalysed by Blackberries and SMS news alerts.
The experimentation of traditional media organisations such as the ABC, with new news presentation techniques such as Google Earth (www.abc.net.au), allows a kind of fly through, 3D news experience. But this is only the beginning for such trends.
BigPond is preparing to launch a news centre inside Second Life that will allow visitors to see breaking stories across a range of areas emblazoned live on the walls of a virtual current affairs nerve centre - a new kind of "multi-function polis". This approach to news provides the flexibility to eventually combine a traditionally centralised, Web portal approach to news on the one hand, with various kinds of user generated content on the other hand.
UGC-based news will be at centre stage in these changes. This will be especially so as new devices merge comments with locations. The Socialight service in New York City (socialight.com) was an early example of how location-based services on phones can allow communities of people to create an overlay of information on their environment to entertain, inform and foster social intercourse.
GeoGraffiti (www.geograffiti.com) is an example of the blossoming new services being born for use with Apple's location-aware iPhone. Users (so far only in the United States) can make a casual audio recording about their location at any time. Such recordings become available for subsequent visitors to that location to listen to.
Today such comments are used for trivial purposes such as to report an inaccessibly locked toilet in an airport or shopping centre. But in future, comments left around the halls of power in Canberra or the sports stadiums of the next Olympics, for example, could become an intriguing perspective on public affairs and major events.
This feature has been possible with text-based annotations for a while via Google maps, but the uptake has been slow. The new approach based on audio rather than text is likely to be more popular for two reasons. The iPhone is able to automatically know a person's location so there is no need to enter a map location manually. And audio comments can be created and uploaded much faster than text, with fast 3G networks allowing a quick, troublefree upload.
It is ironic but plausible that these services bring contemporary technocrats closer to the ancient Aboriginal idea of the dreamtime. The Aboriginal idea of a continuum existing between human consciousness and the environment is arguably far ahead of its time. With new services such as GeoGraffiti, our consciousness becomes embedded into our environment in a way that gestures back to the dreamtime.
Anthropologists and sociologists are giving a lot of thought to these areas. A recent article in the Australian Financial Review entitled "Is Google Making us Dumber", explored how our conception of time and space has been changed by technology, particularly the Internet. Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic observed: "The clock's methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away.
As the late MIT computer scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, "Computer Power and Human Reason: from Judgement to Calculation", the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments 'remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality'. In deciding when to eat, to sleep, to work, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.'
Will we start obeying the Internet in the same way? Will virtual worlds and location-based services make us wiser and more insightful?
It remains to be seen what effect on human consciousness and storytelling the increasing prevalence of location-based services such as GeoGraffiti will have. Perhaps we - and the protagonists in the stories we tell - will hunt for clues embedded in the environment and defer to the readouts on our handheld information appliances more readily than we look within our own hearts or to the sage human companions around us.
Will we end up like Jack Bauer in 24 - forever driven, agitated, distracted ... and downloading local telemetry to our PDA? Hopefully we will still notice and take the time to mull over the symbolic, still peer inside the secret casket of our heart even if it contains a vapour rather than a jewel.