Go and find something out

Centre for Journalism undergrads may remember that snippet from the Tom Cruise film Minority Report that I showed them in week one's first lecture. Cruise is a cop on the run from his own police force in the year 2054 and jumps on a tube train. The guy sitting opposite is reading a copy of USA Today, whose splash suddenly updates in front of his eyes to reveal the Cop On the Run story, complete with pictures of the fugitive...

During Welcome Week, we sent our first year students out with Canon HV30 video cameras and radio microphones to interview each other as an ice-breaking exercise. Today, they used that footage as a demonstration of how to digitise footage from the camera, make a simple cut in Premiere Elements, compress the output file and upload the resulting clip of a minute or so to the centreforjournalism site.

Two contrasting stories from France this morning draw attention to the state of flux in our industry and its still robust ability to challenge official orthodoxy. 

How will expensive reporting be paid for in the multimedia future? Can the web fund future Bob Woodwards and Paul Foots? I believe Centres like ours must contribute to the search for economic models that can preserve the quality and plurality of journalism. I've written about the topic at greater length today on the Guardian's CommentisFree website.  

The endgame for the newspaper is in sight, says Philip Meyer, hack-turned-professional-doomsayer and author of The Vanishing Newspaper. That 2005 book is commonly quoted as predicting April 2043 as the date on which the last New York Times appears - although in fact his model suggests the industry would have capitulated long before that.