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What’s Next for News?In any place we go, there will existthe potential for a bombardment ofinformation that has been aggregatedabout the thousands of digital objectsthat describe in some way our physicalenvironment—its infrastructure, history,culture, commerce and politics.In the mix will be social and personalinformation and sometimes evenfictional events with this place as abackdrop.With access to this realm of information,complex objects will becomeself-explanatory. People will be ableto display operating and maintenanceinstructions in text, graphics or evenin geolocated video and sound. Andjust as it will be very easy to encodeand view facts about a place, it will besimilarly simple to overlay the placeMost of the apps on the first generation of smartphonesrely on GPS and an internal compass to provide generalinformation about a place. Photo courtesy of Layar.with fictional art and media. Andwhen this happens, even neutral spacescan be transformed into sensory richentertainment experiences.As travelers in information, journalistswill have the job of makingsense of this new world and they willdo this with a fresh palette of digitaltools. It will be incumbent on themto find ways to tell stories about ournew blended realities, using tools thatmake possible these new dimensions.Imagine the possibilities of being ableto describe in detail the cultural andsocial histories of a place that foreshadoweda newsworthy event—anddo this in augmented reality so peoplecan visualize all of this.There is also the opportunity tooverlay statistical probabilities ofan event occurring. Forexample, if a driver lookingfor a parking space cansee that there have beenmany auto thefts nearby,he might decide to parksomewhere else. If peoplecould discover that thereis a very high incidenceof communicable diseasesnear a restaurant,they might choose to eatelsewhere.News organizations andstart-up entrepreneurs areonly beginning to explorethe potential of augmentedreality. Map out wherenews stories occur at amoment in time and yousurely will find storiesfrom Washington, D.C.and Baghdad, others fromAfghanistan, and a mixtureof local coverage. However,if we gather stories relatedto a place over a longerperiod of time, there isa higher density of newspresent in that place. Andso both the temporal andspatial density of informationin any one place canbecome a more completeand richer resource.Recently Microsoftdemonstrated how we’llbe able to see old photos and videosof an earlier time overlaid directly andprecisely on a rendering of the currentenvironment. This will enableus to understand better (by seeing)what a place was like at another time.Indeed, it’s likely that we’ll be able tosee from recordings video ghosts ofpeople walking down the street andlisten to them describe experiencesfrom another time in this exact place.This futuristic vision of the digitalaugmentation of our real world seemsquite strange, even disorienting, toour contemporary sensibilities. Inits entirety, it is not yet imminent.We have ample time to explore theimplications, challenges, dilemmasand opportunities that it poses.At the Institute for the Future, wehelp people to systematically thinkabout the future by following a basicmethodology of planning for disruptivechanges ahead; the process involvesthree stages—foresight to insight toaction. Foresight happens by gatheringand synthesizing expert opinions;one expert might be able to describea clear view, but one limited by herown realm of expertise. By gatheringviews from multiple experts, we startto see things at the intersection ofvarious views. Then by developingthese vivid views of the possible future,we arrive at what we can grasp as theprobable future. The next step is toselect actions to build what is seenas a desirable future that is based oncontextual insights.Through this process, one overarchingtheme remains at the centerof our thinking. We are not victimsof the future; we can shape our ownfutures. The takeaway for journalistsis that the tools and probable use ofaugmented reality are not the stuff ofscience fiction. To those who find waysto use this technology to tell stories—togather and distribute news—will flowthe audience. Mike Liebhold is a senior researcherand distinguished fellow at theInstitute for the Future, an independentnonprofit research group in PaloAlto, California.68 Nieman Reports | Summer 2010