Intrinsitivity

http://www.youtube.com/symphony

Newspaper companies worry that they are dying. Revenues and subscription rates are falling, workers are being layed off, and some companies are indeed stopping their presses for good. Yet, despite this, I see newspaper companies surviving for the foreseeable future.

Print is dying. And printed newspapers are dying. However, functionally speaking, newspaper companies perform the essential service of employing scores of professional journalists to write news and commentary about current events. Professional journalists are highly valued content providers and play a singular role in disseminating information for mass consumption.

It is true that newspaper companies are increasingly competing with emerging prosumers, like bloggers and microbloggers. However, just as photography did not kill painting and film did not kill photography, so, too, will online publishers, again, functionally speaking, not kill newspaper companies. Instead, as I see it, newspaper companies will continue to provide their integral journalistic services through the medium of the Internet.

Professional journalists are not a dying breed and neither are the companies that employ them, despite the antiquated terminology.* Professional and amateur journalists alike will continue to work together–or, at least, tolerate one another–to provide useful and important information to large numbers of informationally addicted and overloaded people.

* Perhaps, they should call themselves newspixel companies.

Robot scientists can think for themselves

Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.