Over the past decade, the media have changed beyond recognition, and this process is irreversible. What will be the media of the future?

Robots will be responsible for preparing the news

Big data technologies have made their way into journalism. Robots have already been given information about weather, traffic jams, exchange rates, exchange reports, sports results, and other programmatically algorithmized messages. It is likely that news based on news agencies’ messages will be generated without human intervention in several years.

What does all this mean for editorial offices? Journalists will be able to delegate boring routine work to robots. At this time, they will be engaged in more important and exciting things – journalism of investigations, interpretations and explanations, expansion of readers’ horizons.

Even now, robotic services are successfully used by the media. Automated Science launched the Wordsmith algorithm a few years ago, generating up to 2,000 notes per second. In the future, this trend will only gain momentum.

There won’t be a machine uprising

There can only be one answer to the question of whether traditional journalism will disappear – negative. Robots are just assistants to journalists, not their replacement. So students of journalism faculties have nothing to fear: their profession will remain in demand unless the first step of the career ladder is different. There is no need for journalists to collect and systematize some data at the beginning of their careers. Now, novice journalists can safely step over this step thanks to robots and immediately start creating.

For a long time, there has been a tendency to present materials with reduced volume, increase illustrative and interactive components, develop video formats, and so on. But this does not mean that the consumption of traditional voluminous, deep materials that immerse readers in the very essence of the problem has decreased significantly. Investigation journalism and robots? Only as assistants.

The printing press will remain a niche product

In some cases, paper is still in use – say, e-books did not kill the business of publishing houses. There is a fairly noticeable layer of an audience, which is not ready to switch not only to messengers but even just online. 

However, it is worth admitting that the print press market is generally dead. It does not compete with digital formats either in terms of the interest of the reading audience or in terms of advertising money. Only niche publications of a certain format remained on paper (well, how not to read the in-flight magazine on the plane?).

Bloggers will remain bloggers

The thesis that bloggers (or vloggers or streamers) are journalists of the future is at least controversial. For the most part, they produce entertainment content for a fairly narrow target audience of a certain age – and, alas, quite often, it is of very mediocre quality. Does this have anything to do with journalism? Of course not. 

The journalist has completely different tasks, and he uses completely different methods to solve them. Quality content should have value, and its purpose is not only to entertain the reader or viewer but also to captivate him, convey some thought to him, help him formulate his opinion on a particular issue.

Another important difference between a blogger and a journalist is that the latter should check the facts and provide only reliable information, and the blogger does not have such an obligation. However, some bloggers have quite successfully mastered the format of civil journalism, which perfectly complements the modern information field and is already an integral part of it, blurring the line between professional media and personal blogs.

Content recommendations will become even more accurate

We live in an age of recommendations. They await us not only in the online space but also in everyday life. And often, we don’t even think about anything – we just do what influencers recommend. In supermarkets, caring merchandisers have complementary goods on the shelves nearby, as if hinting at the need to buy them together.

The same thing happens on the Internet. Social media feeds recommend to us the posts of those people and groups with whom we interact most actively. On media sites, “topic materials” have long been formed by self-learning algorithms: we are shown only those messages that we are most likely to click on. Recommendation platforms form a smart feed of publications for readers from popular sites and communities on social networks based on personal preferences.

Summing up, we would like to note that the media world is often unpredictable. Sometimes unique media fail financially but show the market a high bar for the production and distribution of content. Changing reality becomes an incentive to find strategies that will lead to the creation of a new future – where the word “crisis” no longer applies to the media market.