COLUMN ONE : Inventing the 'Paper' of Future : Amid stagnant readership and weak advertising, newspapers worry about long-term prospects. Will electronic devices someday deliver a customized news product?

By DAVID SHAW

June 2, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Twenty years from now--give or take a decade--you may get your news each morning from a fancy machine, a multimedia home information appliance with a dazzling array of personalized, interactive features, all of which will be as easy to use as opening a newspaper and none of which will leave ink on your hands.

This device--one scientist calls it a “knowbot” (knowledge robot)--will probably be a hybrid of a sophisticated television set (with a large, flat screen and high-resolution picture) and a high-powered computer (probably without a keyboard because you’ll operate it by touching the screen or talking directly to it).

The knowbot will also combine elements of an advanced fax machine, videocassette recorder and high-speed printer, all fed by a fiber-optic cable that will provide two-way communication and enable you to receive several hundred channels of information, entertainment and in-house shopping.

Does all this mean the end of the daily newspaper as we’ve known it in this country for more than 200 years?

Yes.

And no.

Most experts in communications technology agree that some form of printed newspaper will survive well into the next century. But the traditional newspaper--ink-on-paper, delivered to your home or to a news rack--will evolve over several decades, the experts say, into a multifaceted information source incorporating new technologies and old functions.

Newspapers, wire services and broadcast networks will continue to be the primary gatherers ofnews for the foreseeable future, but sometime in the next couple of decades, the newspaper will probably be delivered electronically to your home, where you can print all or part of it yourself.

“People that proclaim the death of the newspaper prematurely are going to be surprised,” says David Bohrman, executive producer of the ABC News Interactive multimedia project. “There’s something very comfortable about having something to hold.”

The conventional newspaper is familiar, foldable, lightweight, fully portable (no batteries necessary), cheap enough to lose or misplace without concern, ideal for wrapping garbage, and possessed of an element of serendipity that has so far eluded creators of electronic newspaper prototypes.

“A newspaper does a really good job of giving you a lot of information,” says Walter Bender, director of electronic publishing for the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although readers may be interested in only a small percentage of that information, “it’s easy to get at that part,” Bender says.

But one of the primary advantages of the newspaper of the future will be its individualization: You will receive only that “small percentage” of the daily news that interests you, if that’s what you want, and that news will be accompanied by other, non-news information, also especially selected for you.

Most major newspapers publish local or neighborhood sections designed to appeal to readers in different parts of their circulation area, but that structure ignores reality, says Edward Miller, an associate at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“It doesn’t matter where I live or work--which are probably two different places,” Miller says. “People’s lives are being lived not so much by geography but by . . . communities of interest.”

The information appliance that will provide news in the future is likely to be programmed by you to recognize and service those individual interests.

Your electronic newspaper may give prominent attention to a story on a banking scandal in Tokyo or an earthquake in Guatemala; it may have a Page 1 story on a political development in your hometown; talk about trends in child care or fly-fishing; report on freeway construction on your route to work; summarize how your personal stock market investments are performing, and tell you where the best prices are for the groceries you need for your new diet.

To find all this information, the device would constantly scan and update information from any published or broadcast source you designate. In time, it will respond to verbal instructions, allowing you to ask for such detail as background information, maps, animated graphics, moving pictures and music.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, your information appliance might have suggested listening to a taped translation of one of Saddam Hussein’s speeches. With the release from prison of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, it might have suggested reading, for historical perspective, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

Because your information appliance will have your daily schedule, it will know how much time you have for the news of most immediate interest to you--your tailor-made “front page.” Many of today’s young people, accustomed to computer and television screens, may prefer to read the “front page” on their computer screens; others will want it printed to read over breakfast.

That front page might also include “E mail”--electronic messages sent to you overnight--canceling your lunch meeting and rescheduling your dental appointment, both perhaps more important “news” to you than what the President said yesterday.

Your information appliance may prepare an additional 20 minutes of news and other kinds of information on an audiotape for you to listen to while you dress and shave or put on your makeup--and another 30 minutes videotaped from various broadcasts for you to watch while you ride your stationary exercise bicycle.

Most people probably don’t want or need this much news, but “news” will be much more broadly defined in the future to include reports on hobbies, shopping, entertainment and travel.

Instead of (or in addition to) subscribing to a specific newspaper, a reader could have an electronic smorgasbord of a newspaper, probably magazine-size in format. That electronic newspaper might include the weekly science section from the New York Times, the daily Style section from the Washington Post, restaurant reviews from the Los Angeles Times, tests of new automobiles from Consumer Reports.

A personalized electronic newspaper sounds ideal to those who feel burdened by information overload. To them, trying to stay well-informed these days is like trying to take a sip of water from a ruptured fire hydrant. They’re thrilled by the idea of a newspaper that would filter and sort information, not just produce and present it.

Advertisers might be equally delighted to have their ads sent only to consumers then likely to be shopping for their products, rather than paying for hundreds of thousands of readers who aren’t interested.

But even many people working to create such a newspaper worry about its long-term social consequences.

Won’t a personalized, electronic newspaper carry primarily short stories, devoid of the context and background essential to a truly informed citizenry?

What if people read little news and use their information appliances primarily to keep up with the Dodgers, order tickets to rock concerts and watch “Hacker Knows Best” (or some other 21st-Century equivalent of the old-time situation comedies)?

Newspaper readership and voter turnout have both declined precipitously in recent years; might the opportunity for personalized-cum-trivialized “news” accelerate the trend toward passivity, indifference and ignorance? Or might newspaper readership and voting become almost exclusively activities for the elite in our society in the years to come?

And what of our sense of community?

Almost 25 years ago, Marshall McLuhan spoke of communications technology that would link everyone across state and national boundaries, creating one vast global village. But the next generation of communications technology--custom-tailored, personalized technology--may leave not a global village but a global vacuum . . . and a global cacophony.

“The thing that creates a society is a certain amount of commonality that can be presupposed as part of a background across that whole subculture,” says John Seely Brown, vice president of the Palo Alto Research Center for Xerox. The traditional newspaper, he says, has long been instrumental in “creating a background reference plane,” providing the social glue that “brings individual minds together to radically enhance our ability to communicate.”

If everyone is seeing different stories and advertisements, people will often wind up talking about different subjects and having different priorities, and that commonality and sense of community will greatly diminish--a special danger in our increasingly multicultural society, where fragmentation is already a major concern.

Several futurists and experts in communications technology also said they don’t know how a personalized newspaper could include the stories many people read every day that have nothing to do with what they are normally interested in, stories that just happen to catch the reader’s eye. The same is true of advertisements.

“You must read a newspaper for what you didn’t know that you didn’t know,” says David Lockton, president of Interactive Network in the Silicon Valley.

Jerry Bennington, president of X*Press Information Services, says, “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

Moreover, because readers learn how to scan their regular newspaper to find what they want, they develop a peripheral awareness and at least superficial knowledge of some issues and events without actually reading much about them.

It’s easy to be mesmerized by the potential of technology, but computers--ideal when you want to search for a specific piece of information--are not terribly effective for scanning or browsing.

Scanning and browsing may become luxuries that many people feel they no longer have the time to indulge in, though. Besides, newspaper publishing today is an anachronistically expensive, inefficient business--and a long-term threat to the environment.

Newspapers spend an enormous amount of money to gather an enormous amount of information; only a small percentage of that information is actually published--most of it virtually identical for all readers regardless of their varying interests. The information is used only once--printed in tens of thousands of copies, trucked to individual locations, read and thrown away. The next day, the entire process begins anew--and more trees are killed to produce more papers.

With newspapers in an increasing cost crunch, the personalized electronic newspaper seems a likely solution to many of these problems, especially as part of a larger electronic information service that could ultimately include:

* A battery-operated computer with a “flat-panel” screen, all about the size of a thick magazine, weighing 1 1/2 pounds or less, that you could carry with you for periodic updates on news, sports, weather, stocks and other information.

* A personal beeper-cum-cellular telephone that will provide personal communication and alert you instantly to news or other information.

* A computerized automobile navigation system, complete with maps and traffic information.

John B. Evans, executive vice president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., envisions the electronic newspaper as an integral part of a fully wired home.

A digital television set would monitor what you watch, “pay your bills, do your bank balance . . . watch your kids swimming in the pool,” he says. “It is the family data and entertainment and information center.

“Let’s just take a typical house . . . within the next 25 to 30 years. A person . . . would enter it on either a voiceprint or a thumbprint that would be connected to a central computer . . . (which would) greet us by our first name (and say), ‘While you’ve been out, there’s been 14 minutes of television you’d be really interested in.

“ ‘Would you like to see it now or later?’ ”

To many techno-phobic Americans, this vision of the newspaper of the future sounds more like the Newspaper From Hell. But the rapid spread of home computers, calculators, Nintendo games, fax machines, cellular telephones and VCRs shows that there is a substantial and growing market for new technologies.

Although the electronic newspaper of the future sounds dizzyingly complicated and forbiddingly expensive, scientists say that most of the fundamental technology exists, and scores of experiments with various elements are under way.

Such computerized data services as CompuServe and Dialog already provide news and electronic messaging for users, and Dow Jones--publisher of the Wall Street Journal--has an electronic clipping service that automatically culls articles from the Dow Jones news and business wires on subjects designated by users.

The Media Lab at MIT is working on a personalized electronic newspaper that would incorporate elements of newspaper page layout, design and illustration, rather than just provide screens of text, as many computerized information services now do.

Prodigy Services Co. in White Plains, N.Y., provides almost 1 million computer users with up-to-the-minute news, sports and weather reports, entertainment listings, home banking and shopping services, product ratings from Consumer Reports, stockbroker services, travel reservations and “columns” by experts on parenting, gardening, cooking, and dozens of other subjects.

In April, Prodigy announced a joint venture with USA Today for a national, computerized classified advertising service.

Some newspapers are already taking tentative steps with the new technology--allowing readers to receive news and/or submit letters to the editor by telephone, computer or fax.

More dramatically, Warner New Media, a division of Time Warner, is marketing a multimedia disc, known as CD-ROM (compact disc-read only memory) on the Gulf War. A CD-ROM can hold the equivalent of more than 50 full-length books; with an Apple Macintosh computer, buyers of the Time Warner disc can choose from a variety of on-screen menus to read text, see pictures and hear sound recordings on war-related events.

Users can view maps, charts, graphs and photographs, as well as: all war stories published in Time magazine; the original, unpublished correspondents’ files from which these stories were written; actual, recorded telephone conversations between Time reporters in the field and their editors in New York; speeches, press briefings and ABC radio broadcasts on the war, and background information on individuals, countries and weapons involved in the war.

With all these innovations under way, the major remaining problem for the newspaper of the future is figuring out how to assemble the technology in a low-cost package that will invite rather than intimidate potential users.

Scientists and media executives agree that if the newspaper of the future isn’t as accessible as the newspaper of the present, it will fail faster than you can say “Edsel.”

Perhaps that helps explain why Prodigy has been such a big money-loser so far, costing its parent companies, IBM and Sears, Roebuck & Co., an estimated several hundred million dollars.

Only the “lunatic fringe of news junkies” would scan a computer screen for news, says Jerry Bennington, president of X*Press Information Services, “and I have talked to every one of them and I know them by their first names.”

For an electronic newspaper to have broad appeal, it will have to be “as much fun as Nintendo and as exciting as MTV,” Bennington says.

Or, as Marc Porat puts it: Most people won’t tolerate anything much more complex than what they do now to get the morning paper: “I open the front door. I bend over. I pick up the newspaper and I take the rubber band off.”

Porat’s Silicon Valley company, General Magic, is developing what he calls a “personal intelligent communicator,” and he says that if any new device designed to replace the traditional newspaper “requires much more technical sophistication than using a telephone, we’ve lost. . . . If it comes with a user’s manual, we’ve lost.”

Thus, no one is predicting the immediate demise of the printed newspaper. But new technology, combined with increasing financial pressures on newspapers, may render them more vulnerable than ever to radical change.

Newspaper advertising revenue--which accounts for 79% of all newspaper revenue--dropped last year for the first time since 1970 and for only the third time since World War II. Newspaper profits plummeted by more than 50% at some newspapers early this year.

Some industry optimists see these decreases as cyclic, but newspapers may be undergoing a permanent change.

“The traditional newspaper formula has been to bring together the largest number of readers,” and advertisers have been willing to pay for that mass audience, says Kathleen Criner, vice president at the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. But Criner says that “structural changes in the marketplace” have raised questions about whether that formula will continue to work over the next 2O years:

* Newspaper circulation has remained relatively constant for more than 25 years, despite a 30% increase in the nation’s population.

* The number of newspapers sold per 100 homes has been cut almost in half since 1950.

* Only 52.6% of the American public read a newspaper every day; in 1967, 73% did so. Among people ages 18 to 29, the decline has been even more alarming, plummeting from 60% to about 30%.

Many readers, especially young readers, increasingly complain that the newspaper is irrelevant, boring and inaccessible--especially when compared to television news, MTV and video games.

“Sooner or later, the delivered-to-the-door document (newspaper) designed to convey information and only information will disappear,” says Donald Peppers, president of Perkins/Butler Direct Marketing.

Many people said much the same thing about the future of network television when cable TV became available. Before long, experts said, people would have several hundred channels to choose from and the networks would shrivel and die. That hasn’t happened. Yet. But the number of cable channels has increased 150% in the last decade, and the networks’ share of the prime-time viewing audience has dropped more than 25%.

Some forecasts on the early availability of an electronic newspaper may also be too optimistic. But most experts in communications technology believe it will happen, sooner or later.

When? Estimates by experts range from five years to 50 years, which makes them only slightly more useful than a Ouija board.

Tyler Peppel, a marketing manager at Apple Computer, says that a personalized electronic newspaper will be “fairly common” in five to 10 years.

Prototypes of a complete multimedia, home information appliance could be available by the end of the decade, other experts say, and newspapers as we now know them could drop dramatically in impact and appeal, perhaps beginning as soon as 15 or 20 years from now.

But Stan Cornyn, president of Warner New Media, says a home information appliance, complete with personalized, electronic newspaper and interactive voice recognition, probably won’t be widely available until “about the time we colonize Mars.”

Those who agree with Cornyn that the traditional newspaper will be with us for a long, long time point to the introduction of the “picture telephone” at the 1939 World’s Fair and subsequent predictions that it would soon be widely available.

“One of the things I’ve learned from many years of being in this business is that everything happens slower than you think it’s going to happen,” says David Waks, director of business development for Prodigy Services.

Even today, only about 20% of all homes have computers--and only about 30% of those have the modems that enable computers to communicate with one another by telephone.

There won’t be “all of a sudden . . . some wonderful new product that consumers are going to rush to” to receive the news, says Walter Baer, deputy vice president of domestic research at the RAND Corp. “We’re going to see more of a trickle-down from business and professional uses . . . into the high-end consumer market and then eventually into the mass market,” much as there was with VCRs, computers, fax machines and car phones.

Some business users may be willing to pay a high price for the first generation of the new news technologies to gain information that could give them a competitive edge. But the average home reader/user is likely to wait until the price comes down considerably.

Many in the newspaper industry insist that electronic newspapers may never be cheap or accessible enough to represent a real threat to the conventional newspaper.

Several newspaper organizations--including Times Mirror Co., parent company of The Times--experimented with services to provide news on computer and television screens in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the failure of those crude, expensive videotex prototypes persuaded some in the industry that newspapers were safe from electronic invasion or usurpation.

This false sense of security may have delayed newspapers from experimenting with more sophisticated electronic technology.

After all, newspapers themselves took more than 100 years to reach 50% of the population; telephones took almost 70 years to do the same thing. But television took only 15 years.

“The rate of innovation in this area now is astonishing,” says David Nagel, vice president at Apple Computer.

Joyce Sherwood of The Times’ editorial library assisted with research on these articles.

The Electronic Experiment

Experiments with various elements of what could be the newspaper of the future are being conducted in journalistic, academic and scientific settings around the country. Among them:

* The Media Lab at MIT has been working for several years on a personalized electronic newspaper.

* Apple Computer Inc. developed a CD-ROM (compact disc-read only memory) for a daily “electronic newspaper” experiment at a convention of educators in Atlanta last fall.

Warner New Media is marketing a CD-ROM that enables users to see and/or hear stories, maps, charts, graphs and photographs, recorded telephone conversations, speeches and press briefings on the Gulf War.

* Prodigy Services in White Plains, N.Y., provides almost 1 million computer users nationwide with up-to-the-minute news, sports and weather reports, entertainment listings and various shopping and financial services.

* X*Press Information Services, a subsidiary of Tele-Communications Inc., gathers news from wire services here and abroad and transmits that data by computer 24 hours a day from Denver to 15 million households in 700 communities, including parts of Los Angeles.

* Individual Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., sends a personalized, daily newsletter to more than 100 clients by fax and electronic mail.

* ABC News has a bilingual civics and current events project, now available to many schools, based on laser disc technology.

* Synapse Technologies in Los Angeles is developing a combination of laser disc, CD-ROM and computer software to provide a multilingual, multimedia account of the voyage of Columbus to the New World; users can switch between languages at will throughout the presentation.

* Tele-Communications Inc., the nation’s largest cable TV company, announced a joint venture last month with AT&T; and US West to test a system that will enable viewers to order any of 1,000 movies and special events by remote control from their living rooms, rather than going to video rental stores.

* Matsushita is testing a “voice recognition interface” that would enable television viewers to change channels by speaking to their sets.

* Interactive Network in Mountain View has developed a small, computer-like device that allows users to play along with television game shows and predict individual plays on televised sport events. David Lockton, president of Interactive, says his system will ultimately be used for interactive news, stock and sports reports as well.

Newspaper Readership

Newspaper readership has declined in recent years.

Percentage of survey respondents who say they read a newspaper everyday.

1962: 80

‘67: 73

‘72: 69

‘77: 62

‘82: 54

‘87: 55

‘90: 53

Newspaper Circulation

While the U.S. population has grown...