In a speech in Washington, D.C. to promote his new book, Boom!, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw spoke about the future of journalism, the Business & Media Institute reports.
Journalists, he said, will always be needed to interpret information for the public. “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.”
On the subject of print journalism specifically, Brokaw said, “I was at The Washington Post earlier today, 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…I looked at (it) 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.
“You talk to (young people) about the tactile experience at the newspaper and they look at you, and it’s like ‘Man, what planet were you born on?'”