Bob McCarty Writes

Anyone can predict the future. To predict the future of news, however, one needs to look into the past or, stealing a phrase from Hollywood, BACK TO THE FUTURE. Steve Boriss is doing just that at Washington University in St. Louis.

The bearer of a now-dusty, 23-year-old journalism school degree who has spent most of his professional life working closely with members of the news media at the local, state and national levels, I became interested in Boriss’ work after reading one of his recent articles, What journalism schools should be teaching, at Pajamas Media and the mini-bio that followed:

Steve Boriss blogs at The Future of News. He works for Washington University in St. Louis, where he is Associate Director of the Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) and teaches a class called “The Future of News.”

Very interested in his topic, I fired off an e-mail to Boriss about my interest in auditing his class at Wash U. He responded with appropriate details and went a step further, inviting me to attend a meeting of a group of St. Louis-area conservatives at which he would deliver a presentation based on another of his PJM articles, “Mainstream Media: The Opposite of What Jefferson Wanted News to Be.”

I accepted the invitation and, last night, attended the meeting which was, of course, held in a smoke-filled private room in the back of a popular local restaurant.*

Boriss’ delivered a well-crafted and thorough presentation. I won’t rehash it here. Instead, I simply recommend you read it (click here) and the other articles at Boriss’ blog, The Future of News.

*I used the “smoke-filled room” description for effect only. In reality, the room was smoke-free and, as far as I know, no elected officials were present.