Presented October, 2015, at the conference of the College Media Association, Austin, Texas.

1. Crystal Ball: The Future of the
Internet and Journalism
Jon Lebkowsky, EFF-Aus@n

2. Who am I?
• Early Internet adopter (1990)
• Electronic Fron@er Founda@on and EFF-Aus@n
• The WELL and Wired Magazine
• Commerce and community: FringeWare, Inc.
• Cyberculture author, Mondo 2000, Boing Boing,
21C, Aus@n Chronicle, et al.
• Blogger (Weblogsky, Worldchanging)
• Whole Foods Market (?!)
• Web development

4. The Internet
• Originally a network of coopera@ng networks
• Evolved as a high-end, pervasive informa@on
delivery system
• Increasingly a plaRorm for all media (digital
convergence)
• “Anyone can play” (low barrier to entry)
• Evolu@on: Big Media
• Evolu@on: Many to Many => Social Web

5. What’s been changing
• High speed (broadband)
• Global
• MONEY
• More centralized (not quite the cable tv model)
• More mobile, more broadly accessible
• The Stacks dominate business/plaRorm
• Privacy and surveillance issues
• Social/interac@ve

6. Evolving Web
• Network effect (adop@on)
• Par@cipa@on can be tracked
• Power law distribu@on of aaen@on
• tl;dr – economy of aaen@on
• PlaRorm diversity, responsive design
• Seman@c web
• Rich media

7. On the one hand informa@on wants to
be expensive, because it's so valuable.
The right informa@on in the right
place just changes your life.
On the other hand, informa@on wants
to be free, because the cost of gehng
it out is gehng lower and lower all the
@me. So you have these two figh@ng
against each other. // Stewart Brand

8. Business Trends
• Corporate ownership/control; ethics of journalism,
“post-informa@on age”
• New business models: Revenue Diversifica@on -
nontradi@onal revenue streams, digital agency
• New payment models, evolu@on of micropayments
• End (or diminu@on) of free culture
• Paywalls
• Clickbait! Content vs News; SEO-driven content
• Na@ve adver@sing (contextually relevant, in feeds or
search)

9. Content Trends
• Content strategy (crea@on, delivery, governance,
redistribu@on)
• Data journalism
• Tes@ng culture
• Prolifera@on of mobile devices
• Social media, personal marke@ng, marke@ng culture
• Crowdsourcing Media - Seamless integra@on of UGC
(e.g. Weather Channel); photojournalism impact
• Popularity of SMS, simpler mobile-op@mized websites
• Personaliza@on and demand media.

10. Bonus: Gamergate!
• Culture war
• Anonymity
• Community media
• Fact vs Opinion
• Free speech vs harassment
• Scale
• Signal vs noise

11. - 30 –
jonl@effaus@n.org