Photo via Pixabay

I have a way of looking at time that may seem strange. For example, if you tell me that the web browser was introduced 25 years ago, I’ll be tempted to tell you that 25 years before that was 1968, the year of the first manned Apollo mission, the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the installation of the first automated teller machine. It’s my way of thinking about the passage of time, and the extent to which progress is accelerating or not. My wife makes fun of me.

So if I’m asked where digital media will be in 10 years — and how a journalist like me will have to adapt over that time — I look first to 10 years ago. Facebook had 100 million active monthly users at that time, compared with more than 2.2 billion today. The iPhone had just been introduced, ushering in the mobile-content era. Broadcast and cable TV advertising was still a much bigger business than digital, whereas today digital is bigger. The Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review were still being published.

Those and other changes have felt jarring to me. People now experience most of their digital content (news and otherwise) on mobile devices rather than computers. That alone has changed how newsrooms think about content delivery.

By that measure, the next 10 years are sure to be even more revolutionary for the news business. Virtual reality, augmented reality, 360-degree video and other immersive technologies are maturing to the point that big newsrooms are producing exceptionally high-quality content using them.

Once I experienced immersive journalism, I wondered how long it would be before conventional screens go away. Screens make no sense long term. They give us headaches and neck aches and eye problems and repetitive-strain injury. They’re also passive. Once we’re able to throw a hologram into our living room and experience a story — fiction or nonfiction — as a virtual participant, won’t a flatscreen monitor seem quaint?

The same goes for work. Instead of interacting with computer mice and monitors and keyboards, we’ll have a tactile relationship with data, using motion and voice commands and artificial intelligence to leads us to the information that is most relevant to us in that moment.

Any company that delivers news and data for a living will be disrupted by this. In turn, anyone who does the kind of work I do — sifting through court documents and other public records and then crafting stories using those documents — will be handling and delivering information in whole new ways.

We go where our audience goes. Twenty years ago, that was the web. Ten years ago it was social media. Ten years from now, there’s a good chance that it’ll be VR and AR.

The Pelham (N.Y.) Half Marathon and 10K is an annual charity event, held over Thanksgiving weekend, that has grown from nine runners in 2011 to an expected 1,600 participants this year. Net proceeds from registration fees and sponsorships go to the Pelham Civic Association, which helps neighbors in need. I’m a proud member of this organization.

The 13-mile route covers nearly the entire town of Pelham, but local news media haven’t had a way to capture that sprawl. The promotional media, particularly the videos, are lively and inviting but are limited to what can fit in a frame from the ground.

An inexpensive drone with video capability would enhance this coverage significantly, giving viewers a sense of proportion and context. More than that, video from the sky might encourage a whole different type of engagement, with viewers trying to figure out where their houses and other landmarks are on the course.

There’s been some discussion on the local Facebook discussion groups about doing this. The hurdle, according to the discussions, isn’t cost but rather the FAA’s certification requirements. If I’m reading the aeronautical chart correctly on vfrmap.com, Pelham is within six nautical miles of LaGuardia Airport, requiring drone operators to contact the air tower for any flights above 500 feet. Commercial flights terminating at LaGuardia often use a flight pattern that takes them directly above the Town of Pelham.

Even so, drone photography of the event could be field-tested in advance by a licensed operator using a flight path below 500 feet. Once an ideal flight path is charted, the drone could be programmed to follow the same route during the event itself, as long as the operator has line-of-sight during the entire voyage, in keeping with government rules.

The hypothesis would be that aerial images could give Pelham residents a better sense of place and a compelling view of the race to complement the video and still photography from the ground.

We’ve all seen the brain-scan images that are supposed to tell us something about which parts of our brain are most and least stimulated during certain activities. Doctors use the technology, known as Electroencephalography, or EEG, to test for brain disorders like epilepsy or the extent of the trauma from a brain injury, according to the Mayo Clinic. EEG is also often used in attempts to better understand how certain stimuli, like video games, affect our brains.

Almost all of the news reporting involving EEG technology comes from studies performed by academic or medical researchers in a lab setting. But what if journalists could conduct their own brain-activity studies pegged to the news?

Enter the MindWave Mobile 2 from a company called NeuroSky Inc. It looks like a phone headset, but it measures the alpha and beta waves emanating from the brain and feeds that data to a mobile phone app.

The marketing materials for the product say that it can “monitor your levels of attention and relaxation” in response to music or other prompts. In addition to 100 or so brain-training and educational apps, there are free developer tools to allow users to devise their own uses for the product.

The MindWave Mobile 2 could be useful as a way to crowdsource a study about the effects of social media on our brains. A reporter could seek volunteer readers to wear the headset during certain hours a day for a certain amount of time.

To capture a before-and-after picture of the data, the reporter could have two groups wear the headset during defined periods for a month. Neither group would use social media during that month. Then Group 1 could start using social media again, while Group 2 continues to abstain. Then a comparison of attentiveness and other qualities could be compared between the two groups.

This technology is highly imperfect, and its data shouldn’t be seen as conclusive. But on a micro level, it could be used to inform the policies of school districts. For example, if my district were proposing to do away with physical books in favor of digital books, I might want to conduct a small study on local schoolchildren, comparing the brainwaves of those using paper books vs. e-books. The results might influence the local debate over whether the additional screen time is healthy or not for that community.

I haven’t been in local journalism since the mid-1990s, when I left Newsday to join a national tech magazine. Ever since, my jobs have been national or international in scope.

But for my field test for Emerging Media Platforms, I’m planning to go local. HYPERlocal.

Like, my house local.

My family and I moved into this house in Pelham, N.Y., two years ago. We knew we were choosing a busy street — Boston Post Road, also known as Route 1, which traces the path of the colonial postal route from New York to Boston. It has a double-yellow line and is a conduit between two major highways, the Hutchinson River Parkway and Interstate 95.

Soon after we moved in, we noticed a problem. The traffic on the south side (our side) of the road heading east from the Hutch to I95 narrows from two lanes to one lane just before traffic reaches my house. Even though the speed limit is 30 miles per hour, motorists often battle for the lead position as they approach the merge into one lane. This dangerous game of chicken often results in near-misses, punctuated by drivers leaning on their horns.

Soon after we moved in, I petitioned the Pelham Manor village board to address the problem. The village responded by putting up a temporary speed sign showing motorists how fast they were going, and that slowed down traffic a bit. Then the village installed a sign about a block short of my house, warning drivers that a merge was approaching.

This has helped, but we still hear close calls on a regular basis. The village is reluctant to take any additional action, citing the fact that no accidents have been reported at that section of road.

I call BS. To me, it’s only a matter of time before someone gets killed or seriously hurt along this half-block stretch of road. We still hear a chorus of car horns several times a day, many of which sound like close calls. But until now we didn’t know of a way to prove that so many close calls were occurring, short of sitting on our stoop for hours on end, keeping a log.

Now I’m hoping to use the SparkFun Sound Detector to strengthen my case that more intervention is needed to mitigate the danger in this section of Boston Post Road. This device measures the amplitude of sound waves. One reviewer confirmed that the device could be set to measure noise above a certain decibel level.

Car horns have a unique signature, both in terms of decibel level (110 decibels at 10 meters) and other qualities like duration. My thesis is that I could set up several of these sound detectors along my stretch of Boston Post Road, with settings to specifically pick up car horns and perhaps even multiple car horns blowing at the same time. After a set period of time, to be determined, I would then compare the number and frequency of car horns blowing to illustrate just how treacherous (or not!) this section of Boston Post Road is compared with the other sections.

A preliminary review of the product’s instructions and reviews tells me that this citizen-data project can be accomplished at minimal cost, though the learning curve may be steep.

Other presidents — all presidents, in fact — have grumbled aloud about their treatment by the journalists who cover them. But Donald Trump is different. For him, having the biggest microphone in the competition of ideas isn’t enough, so he sows doubt and mistrust about the people and institutions who report the truth about him. This has the (much-desired) effect of turning truth-telling into a battle of he-said, she-said. Who cares what the truth is, Trump seems to say. The more important question is, Who’s winning?

Calling us “fake” and the “enemy of the people,” Trump “has taken what has been a longtime Republican complaint about media bias in the mainstream and amped it up by a thousand,” the New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg has said.

This may explain why the news media are the bogeymen of virtually every Trump rally in his never-ending campaign. This was true in 2016, and it’s true now. Some of Trump’s most, uh, spirited supporters seem to interpret his words as an invitation to heckle, jeer or even intimidate journalists at these rallies. Some reporters on the receiving end have said they worry that the intense hostility could one day turn violent.

We’ve all seen video of some of these clashes — as a refresher, click on any of the links above. But I suspect that a 360 video of such an encounter might provide a truer sense of what it feels like to be verbally attacked while you’re trying to do your job.

An ideal field test would provide a 360 view of a minute or two of a Trump rally, from the perspective of the traveling press corps. Being immersed in the experience would allow a viewer to choose where to look — and where to listen. This field test could include the use of directional microphones, with one pointed at Trump at the lectern and another pointed at the hecklers. This would allow the volume of each to be raised and lowered depending on where the viewer is looking, providing a sense for the distraction created by the hecklers.

In the modern world of self-selected media, I don’t propose that an immersive experience like this one would change hearts and minds on any measurable scale. And I’ll readily admit that there are many classes of people more worthy of empathy than journalists. But I suspect there’s a sizable number of Americans who are on the fence about whom to believe, and who have begun to caricature or even dehumanize reporters in their minds. An immersive video that gives viewers the sense of being there might get through to some of these people.

A survey would seem to be the best way to measure the effectiveness of such a video experience. Respondents could be asked about their sentiments toward reporters and their work before and after experiencing the video. The results could be further parsed by sorting the results according to where viewers spent most of their time looking and listening.

This reality-capture stuff is trippy. Using the Trnio app, I made a 3D model of a municipal garbage can on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 57th Street in Manhattan, about a block from my office. And using the Game Avatar app, I made a quasi-3D model of my head. The app scanned only my face and filled in the rest, so it wasn’t really a 3D scan.

I could think of at least a few ways that this kind of reality-capture technology could help tell news stories. When a new bridge is being built, for example, one phase before construction is for municipal engineers or private contractors to create a miniature model. Because these are often scale models, they could be scanned and reproduced digitally so that viewers could get a glimpse of what the bridge might look like from their vantage point. The same could be done with new skyscrapers or sports stadiums.

Using aerial photography, virtual models could be made of virtually any location of interest: a war zone, a walled-off city like Pyongyang, an African jungle where elephants are slaughtered for their tusks, the site of the Olympic Games.

It seems clear that field testing the making of a virtual model from a miniature model would be easier and less costly than field tests involving flyovers. Some of that extra expense could be minimized using unmanned drones.

Photo via Pexels

At this stage in my career I’m not about to do a 180 and specialize in 360. But as another potential tool in the proverbial journalistic toolbox, I can envision some ways that 360 video could enhance the coverage of business and finance.

One would be to better represent physical context. For example, a traditional photo or video of a commercial port or a big farm doesn’t do justice to their scale. Sure, the video camera can pan, but even then we’re only seeing a rectangle at a time. Immersing a viewer inside an Amazon warehouse, for example, would tell a much more complex story about Amazon’s innovations than would a traditional video.

In these cases, the viewer can look at whatever s/he wants in the scene. This is both good and bad from a content creator’s perspective, I suspect. On one hand, it’s a powerful new capability that we’re putting in the hands of our audiences. On the other, we can’t express journalistic value judgments as easily. Think about the tools we use in traditional video: editors use B roll to create a mood and direct the viewer’s attention to focal points. Video producers and editors relinquish that power to some degree with 360, it would seem.

I can think of several 360 story types that I’d want to see. We’ve already seen some uses of immersive video to bring greater attention to the effects of global warming. Another would be to show what it’s like inside a Chinese factory while it’s operating. Dangerous work conditions are hard to capture in words or rectangular images. What’s it like to work in a plant in Shenzhen? Just how difficult are the conditions? Even a short 360 video — taken surreptitiously, one presumes — would speak volumes.

Also, health care coverage could use more intimate portraits of people who must cope with chronic illness and uncertain finances. When these stories are told in print, they’re too easily forgotten. But placing viewers into a person’s life encourages empathy, and that’s the kind of information and experience that leads to changes in policy. Knowing about a problem is one thing; being made to feel it is quite another.

Other kinds of business stories for 360 could be classified as luxury porn — a tour of a Scottish mansion, a look around a private mega-yacht, a flyover of Pebble Beach Golf Links, a seat on a South African safari. How about a view from inside the ultra-exclusive World Economic Forum in Davos?

That stuff is not particularly serious, but luxury has long been an essential category of coverage, and advertising, for any business-oriented news organization. Real estate, both for news and for advertising, seems perfect for 360 video as well.

The news industry overall isn’t known for its forward thinking. We let a little bully named Craigslist steal our lunch money without putting up much fight. We resisted charging for access to our news, only to see people become accustomed to free. We even let “news aggregators” get away with virtual larceny and then claim more traffic than we had — for content that *we* had created.

One area where at least a few news organizations are confronting the Innovator’s Dilemma is in news automation. That’s computers writing the news. This has proven effective for producing simple stories using structured data — a ballgame recap, a corporate earnings story, a weather report.

The technology is rudimentary right now. Sometimes it even messes up simple stories. But the investment that news agencies like The AP and Bloomberg are putting into news automation shows that they’ve learned from past mistakes and are prepared to cannibalize at least part of what they do — because if they don’t do it, someone else will. Others are already, in fact.

Of course, the prospect of algorithms writing the news strikes cold fear into journalists of a certain vintage. Yes, some roles will be taken over by these algorithms. But there are so many other stories out there that require arms and legs and human judgment and emotion.

Let the computers have the boring stuff while we humans go after the Next Great Story.