New Technologies May Be Changing Journalism -- But Will They Also Make It Easier to Participate?

Now that enormous quantities of raw information are available to anyone with a computer and a phone line, questions arise not only about the role of journalists and journalism educators, but also about whether people of color will be an integral part of the information superhighway.

At the recently concluded National Association of Hispanic journalist's (NAHJ) Conference in Chicago, the focus was on new technologies and their impact on the journalism profession. The conference was titled: "Welcome, Move Ahead. The Future is Here." Its focus was on the need for journalists "to be fluent in yet another language, the language of computers."

Said an organizer, "More and more media companies continue to venture into new [areas]. Newspapers, television networks and radio networks are unveiling Web pages faster than you can say Internet .... On-line, digital, World Wide Web and cyberspace are fast becoming media industry buzzwords."

The conference, by its very existence, made plain what Claremont College's Tomas Rivera Center (TRC) and other think tanks have warned about: a technological gap exists between communities, color and mainstream society. As if to buttress this assertion, very few Latino information and technology companies participated in the conference.

Further Separation?

In a report last year on Latinos and the information superhighway, TRC warned: "While technology has the potential to support democratic principles, without a guiding social contract the highway may further separate our already segmented society."

Henry Ingle, chairman of the communications department at the University of Texas at El Paso and vice president of technological planning, worries that this gap between the information "haves" and "have-nots" will also affect schools of journalism. While he believes the role of journalists is becoming more important in the information age, he is not so sure that schools of journalism will be able to keep up with the technological demands.