George Gilder Essay: Digital Darkhorse - Newspapers [1 of 2]

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Posted-Date: Sun, 20 Feb 1994 12:21:18 -0500
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 94 10:51:21 CST
From: telecom () delta eecs nwu edu (TELECOM Moderator)
To: telecom () delta eecs nwu edu
Subject: George Gilder Essay: Digital Darkhorse - Newspapers


Here is another article in the series by George Gilder which I thought
you would enjoy for some weekend reading. Send replies in the usual way
for discussion in the week ahead.




PAT


  Date: Sat, 19 Feb 1994 15:43:29 -0500
  From: gaj () portman com (Gordon Jacobson)
  Subject: George Gilder's Fifth Article - Digital Darkhorse - Newspapers




    This series of articles by George Gilder provide some interesting
technological and cultural background that helps prepare readers to
better understand and place in proper perspective the events relative
to the National Data Super Highway, which are unfolding almost daily
in the national press.  I contacted the author and Forbes and as the
preface below indicates obtained permission to post on the Internet.
Please note that the preface must be included when cross posting or
uploading this article.


        The following article, DIGITAL DARK HORSE, was first published
   in Forbes ASAP, October 25th, 1993.  It is a portion of George
   Gilder's book, Telecosm, which will be published IN 1994 by Simon &
   Schuster, as a sequel to Microcosm, published in 1989 and Life After
   Television published by Norton in 1992.  Subsequent chapters of
   Telecosm will be serialized in Forbes ASAP.




                      DIGITAL DARK HORSE - NEWSPAPERS


                                    BY


                              GEORGE GILDER




                        MEDIA MIRROR ON THE WALL,
                      WHO IS THE FAIREST OF US ALL?


     The perennial question of all suitors of fate and fortune now
whispers and resounds through conference resorts, executive retreats
and consulting sessions across the land as business leaders from
Hollywood to Wall Street pose with pundits and ponder the new world of
converging technologies.  Symbolized in a famous mandala by MIT's
Media Lab, this grand fondue of information tools_to be served la
carte on a flat-panel screen_is foreseen to be a $3.5 trillion feast
for American business sometime early next century.  Few would guess
that crucial to the emerging mediamorphosis_as king of the flat
panel_will be a slight, graying, bearded man with some 30 teddy bears,
Roger Fidler.


     Fidler coined the term mediamorphosis as the title of his
forthcoming book.  His office in Boulder, Colo., looks out on the
panorama of a picturesque downtown of red brick and neo-Gothic,
surrounded by the Rocky Mountain foothills and sepia sandstone
buildings of a mile-high Silicon Valley.  Down the hall is an Apple
Computer media center which is developing graphical forms of
AppleLink, the company's on-line network.  Down the block is
Cablelabs, John Malone's research arm, which is designing the future
of the cable industry.


     Roger Fidler, though, is a newspaperman, a veteran of some 32
years in a business little known for technology.  Beginning as an
11-year-old paperboy in Eugene, Oreg., Fidler went on to serve as a
reporter, science columnist and art director before launching what is
now Knight-Ridder Tribune Graphics.  A multimillion-dollar business
and reliable profit center, this venture provides digital graphics for
newspapers and video animations for TV stations across the country
over a dedicated network called PressLink, also launched by Fidler.
Now Fidler and his allies working in Knight-Ridder's Information
Design Laboratory are concocting an audacious plan to make the lowly
newspaper the spearhead of the information economy.


     Most information companies and executives are betting on him to
fail.  Barry Diller, the former ruler of 20th Century Fox, recently
circled the planet of technology on a celebrated pilgrimage from
Hollywood to find where the money would be made in the new information
economy.  Shunning Fidler's little lab, he arrived at nearby Cablelabs
and resolved on home shopping through cable TV.  He bought into QVC
for some $20 million and went into business with John Malone.  After a
more corporate investigation, featuring polls and customer surveys,
Robert Allen of AT&T settled to a remarkable degree on the $14 billion
market in electronic games.  Since launching an alliance with Sega,
AT&T has been collecting game companies as compulsively as your kid
collects games.  It has bought shares of Sierra Online, 3DO, Spectrum
HoloByte and PF Magic.


     Moving toward the news trade is IBM.  But rather than
collaborating with one of the thousands of newspapers that use its
equipment, the computer giant is trysting with General Electric's NBC
in a kind of elephants' waltz into the sunset of old broadcast media.


     Most of these leaders in the new gold rush toward multimedia are
getting it wrong.  Fixated by market surveys that map demand for
existing video, they are plunging down dead ends and cul-de-sacs with
their eyes firmly focused on the luminous visions in their rearview
mirrors.  Blockbuster, Nintendo and other game and video vendors have
good businesses, for the moment, but they are ballast from the past.


NEWS IN THE MICROCOSM


     The leader who best comprehends the promise of the next phase in
information technology may be Fidler of Knight-Ridder.  A student of
electronic technology, he has grasped an amazing and rather obscure
fact: of all the information providers, only newspapers are fully in
tune with the law of the microcosm.


     Based on the constant rise in the computing power of individual
microchips relative to systems of chips, the law of the microcosm
dictates that power will continually devolve from centralized
institutions, bureaucracies, computer architectures and databases into
distributed systems.  On the most obvious level, it caused the fall of
the mainframe computer and the companies that depended upon it, and
assured the ascent of personal computers and workstations.  In the
next decade, the law of the microcosm will assure the displacement of
analog television, with its centralized networks and broadcast
stations, by computer networks with no center at all.  While offering
a cornucopia of interactivity, computer networks can perform all the
functions of TV.


     With the cost-effectiveness of chips still doubling every 18
months, the law of the microcosm is not going away.  Now it dictates
that of all the many rivals to harvest the fruits of the information
revolution, newspapers and magazines will prevail.


     The secret of the success of the newspaper, grasped by Roger
Fidler, is that it is in practice a personal medium, used very
differently by each customer.  Newspapers rely on the intelligence of
the reader.  Although the editors select and shape the matter to be
delivered, readers choose, peruse, sort, queue and quaff the news and
advertising copy at their own pace and volition.


     In this regard, newspapers differ from television stations in
much the way automobiles differ from trains.  With the train (and the
TV), you go to the station at the scheduled time and travel to the
destinations determined from above.  With the car (and the newspaper),
you get in and go pretty much where you want when you want.  Putting
the decisionmaking power into the hands of the reader, the newspaper
accords with the microcosmic model far better than TV does.  Newspaper
readers are not couch potatoes; they interact with the product,
shaping it to their own ends.


     Computers will soon blow away the broadcast television industry,
but they pose no such threat to newspapers.  Indeed, the computer is a
perfect complement to the newspaper.  It enables the existing news
industry to deliver its product in real time.  It hugely increases the
quantity of information that can be made available, including
archives, maps, charts and other supporting material.  It opens the
way to upgrading the news with full-screen photographs and videos.
While hugely enhancing the richness and timeliness of the news,
however, it empowers readers to use the "paper" in the same way they
do today_to browse and select stories and advertisements at their own
time and pace.


     Until recently, the expense of computers restricted this
complementarity to newsrooms and pressrooms.  The news today is
collected, edited, laid out and prepared for the press by advanced
digital equipment.  Reporters capture and remit their data in digital
form.  But the actual printing and distribution of the paper remain in
the hands of printers and truckers.


     Now the law of the microcosm has reduced the price of personal
computers below the tag on a high-end TV and made them nearly
coextensive with newspapers.  Newspapers and computers are converging,
while computers and televisions still represent radically different
modes.  It is the newspaper, therefore, not the TV, that is best
fitted for the computer age.


     Newspapers can be built on foundations of sand_the silicon and
silica of microchips and telecom.  Not only does the computer industry
generate nearly three times the annual revenues of television but
computer hardware sales are growing some eight times faster than the
sales of television sets.  By riding the tides of personal computer
sales and usage, newspapers can shape the future of multimedia.


     High-definition PC displays will benefit text far more than
images.  The resolution of current NTSC (National Television Standards
Committee) analog television_62 dots per inch_is actually ample for
most images, particularly the studio-quality forms that can be
converted for digital delivery over fiber-optic lines.  Even the
conventional interlaced TV screen_in which alternate lines are filled
in every second_easily fools the eye for video.  But for fully
readable text you need the 200 to 300 dots per inch of a laser printer
or super-high-resolution screen. Such screens are now being developed.
Overkill for most images, they could supply the first display tablets
with screens as readable as paper.


FAT PANEL'S DIGITAL NEWSPAPER


     After the "Rocky Mountain High" panorama, the first thing you see
in Roger Fidler's office is a more modest tableau.  At a round table
in the corner is a huge teddy bear he calls Fat Panel.  Fat Panel is
poised to read a tablet that looks very much like a newspaper, but in
fact is a flat-panel screen some nine inches wide, a foot high and a
half-inch thick.  Weighing a little over a pound, far less than the
Sunday edition of your local newspaper, this device_call it a
newspanel_might contain a trove of news, graphics, audio and even
video, representing more than a year of Sunday papers.  Through
fiber-optic lines and radio links, it might connect to databases of
news and entertainment from around the world.


     On the face of this tablet is something that looks a lot like the
page of a newspaper.  It contains headlines for featured stories
followed by their first few paragraphs and a jump to an inner page.
The jump, unlike that in your usual newspaper, is electronic and
immediate.  You click an arrow with a pen or a mouse_or in the near
future, say the word_and the rest of the story almost instantly
appears.  If your eyes are otherwise engaged, you can click on an
audio icon and have the story read aloud to you.


     Discreetly placed on the bottom of the panel are three sample
ads.  Since ads currently supply some 80 percent of the revenues of
many newspapers and magazines, the entire system will rise and fall on
the effectiveness of the ads.  However, electronics promises a more
total revolution in advertising than in any other facet of the
newspaper outside of printing.  This change comes none too soon.  As
shown by a general drop in margins from 30 percent in the mid-1980s to
close to 10 percent last year, newspapers are suffering a sharp
decline in conventional advertising revenues, only partly compensated
for by an influx of funds from blow-in coupons and inserts.


     In a 1988 prophecy at the American Press Institute in Reston,
Va., Fidler envisaged electronic newspanel ads in the year 2000: "When
you touch most ads, they suddenly come alive.  More importantly,
advertisers can deliver a variety of targeted messages that can be
matched to each personal profile.  An airline ad offering discount
fares to South America attracts me with the haunting music of an
Andean flute.  I'm planning to take some vacation time in Peru next
month [Fidler's wife is a Peruvian recording artist], so I touch the
ad to get more information.  Before I quit, I'll check the ad indexes
to see if any other airlines are offering discount fares.  With the
built-in communicator, I can even make my reservations directly from
the tablet if I choose.  The airline's reservation telephone number is
embedded in the ad, and my credit card numbers and other essential
data are maintained in the tablet, so all I would have to do is write
in the dates and times that I want to travel and touch a button on the
screen.  The information is encrypted as well as voice-print
protected, so there is no risk of someone else placing orders with my
tablet.


     Contrary to the usual notion, the electronic newspaper will be a
far more effective advertising medium than current newspapers,
television or home shopping schemes.  Rather than trying to trick the
reader into watching the ad, the newspaper will merely present the ad
in a part of the paper frequented by likely customers.  Viewers who
are seriously interested in the advertised item can click on it and
open up a more detailed presentation, or they can advertise their own
desire to buy a product of particular specifications.


     In deference to Fidler, who currently combs the world looking for
the best flat-panel screens, Fat Panel appears to be perusing a story
on field emission displays (FEDs).  Even cathode ray tubes with VGA
graphics command only 72 dots per inch of resolution.  This has been
shown to slow down reading by some 25 percent compared with paper.
Readers of Voyager Co.'s tomes on Mac PowerBooks quickly discover that
even Susan Faludi's breezy Backlash or Michael Crichton's compulsive
Jurassic Park or James Gleick's normally riveting biography of Richard
Feynman bog down in subtle but insidious typographical fuzz.  A
newspaper with more than one item on the screen would be worse.  The
age of electronic text entirely depends on the development of screens
with the definition of a laser printer.  For this purpose, FEDs offer
great long-term promise.


     While the prevailing liquid crystal displays (LCDs) merely
reflect or channel light, FEDs emit light like a cathode ray tube.
Indeed, as currently envisaged by a Micron Display Technology process,
FEDs will array millions of tiny cathode light emitters that allow
bright displays with high resolution and full-motion video.  Although
today's FEDs require too much power for full portability with current
battery technology, they represent an inviting option for newspaper
tablets at the turn of the century.


     Usable tablets, however, will arrive long before then.  At the
August Siggraph show, Xerox demonstrated a 13-inch-diagonal liquid
crystal display with a record 6.3 million pixels, delivering 279 dots
per inch of resolution.  The 279 dots per inch provide some three
times more definition than the screen of a Sun workstation_the current
desktop graphics workhorse_and negligibly short of the 300-dot
resolution of a laser printer.


     Beyond resolution, the key to the newspaper tablet is
portability.  Portability means low power.  Active-matrix LCDs are
inherently a high-power, low-transmissive medium.  The crystals absorb
light; the polarizer wastes half the light; the transistors at each
pixel squander power.  For high contrast, backlighting is essential.
That sinks another 20 to 30 watts. The higher the resolution, the
worse all these problems become.




FULL-MOTION IMAGES OR FULL-MOTION USERS?


     According to the Fidler vision, the U.S. should stop emulating
the Japanese, who boldly invested some $12 billion in manufacturing
capacity for power-hungry liquid crystal displays used on notebook
computers and flat-screen TVs.  Urged by the Clinton administration,
this U.S. industrial policy is based on a strategy of "catch up and
copy," and it will fail.  Rather than chase the Japanese by achieving
high resolution at high power to compete with cathode ray tubes, the
U.S. should target high resolution at low power to compete with paper.


     As in semiconductor electronics, the winners will follow a
strategy of low and slow.  The law of the microcosm ordains
exponential performance gains from slower and lower-powered
transistors packed ever closer together on individual microchips.
Throughout the history of semiconductors_from the first transistor to
the latest microprocessor_the industry has succeeded by following this
law: replacing faster and higher-powered components with smaller,
slower and lower-powered devices.  When you pack enough of the slow
and low transistors close enough together, your system may end up
operating faster than a supercomputer based on the highest-powered and
fastest discrete transistors.  And it will definitely be more
efficient in MIPS per dollar.


     The law of the microcosm has not been suspended for displays.
The Japanese have been focusing on high-powered screens capable of
reproducing the features of low-end CRTs: full-motion color video.
Rather than favoring full-motion video, however, the U.S. should
foster full-motion readers through low-powered and slow components.
It is the people rather than the pixels that should be able to move.
Speed will come in due course.


     Demonstrating the first prototype of such a system is Zvi Yaniv
of Advanced Technology Incubator (ATI) of Farmington Hills, Mich.
Long among the most inventive figures in America's eternally embryonic
flat-panel industry, Yaniv was a founder of Optical Imaging Systems,
currently the leading U.S.-based producer, with well under one-percent
global market share.


     For his tablet, Yaniv uses a material invented at Kent State
University in Ohio called Polymer Stabilized Cholesteric Texture
(PSCT).  On it he inscribes pixels in the form of helical liquid
crystal devices.  The helices are chemically doped to give them a
specific reflectivity: showing all wavelengths or colors of light that
do not match the resonant wavelengths in the helix.


     So far ATI has demonstrated images in black and white and in 16
levels of gray scale.  Color, according to Yaniv, poses no theoretical
problems.  Based on current experimental successes, it will be
achieved within the next two years.  For the first newspanels,
however, color is less important than the high-resolution text
capability, which ATI delivers at a breakthrough price.


     This technology offers four key advantages over the active-matrix