NBC’s face of news for years spoke to a group this week in Washington, and he said he imagines the printing press will be gone within 10 years. Tom Brokaw was promoting his new book when he made the comments, according to Business & Media Institute.
“I was at The Washington Post earlier today,†Brokaw said. “And in the lobby they’ve got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is … 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought — ‘Ten years from now, will it be here?’ I don’t know. Probably … if you would do a hardcore analysis — probably not. It’ll be probably digital 10 years from now.â€
Brokaw added that he believes there will still be a demand for journalists to interpret information. “There will never not be a need for professional people to take complicated information, put it into a form that viewers and readers will need to know and want to understand,†he said.