Selling Tomorrows

So I asked Google's new News Timeline, "how about the future?"

I typed "future" into Google's new Google News Timeline and it came up with some really cool results: A poem celebrating new year's of 1832 in New England Magazine.   "Future of World Rests on Sound Policy" from the St. Petersburg Times in 1943.  And TIME's 1983 story, "Whatever Became of the Future?"

The results stretch back hundreds of years using various sources and it's absolutely worth exploring. 

By the way, my deep gratitude to Google for clearly spelling out on their site that people can use screen shots of their search results without permission.  Makes bloggers' lives a lot easier.   

  

Popular Mechanics covers: Influencing you since 1902

Popular Mechanics has an online gallery of its covers stretching back to its first issues in 1902. Circulation figures aside, consider the influence that its futuristic images have had on billions of people who have glanced its covers over 107 years.  Check out the futuristic train published in the heart of the great depression, the "shape of tomorrow's planes" from 1954, an idea that still seems cool from 1974 for "a bridge to Alaksan oil," and Miracles of the next 50 years" from February 2000.  This black & white cover is from the first issue.

Framing Science: Belief that climate change is hyped at all-time high

Matthew Nisbet, one of my favorite thinkers on the intersection of PR and science, caught a recent Gallup survey that finds four in 10 Americans believe that the media's reporting on climate change is exaggerated. Here's a snip from his blog, Framing Science:

"A Gallup survey report released yesterday finds that a record 41% of Americans--and 66% of Republicans--now say that news reports of climate change are exaggerated. I first spotted this troubling trend in a 2007 paper analyzing twenty years of public opinion about climate change. This latest survey reinforces my fear that climate advocates have fallen into a dangerous communication trap.

At the root of this growing perception is something I blogged about earlier this week: As long as science is communicated as the principal reason compelling policy action--and this "compelling" science dramatized by a focus on severe environmental impacts such as hurricanes--the message will either fall on passive ears and/or be easily countered as "global warming alarmism."

Back in March, Matthew also picked up a disturbing Pew study stat that says the average mix of five hours of cable news contains just one minute devoted to science and technology.  

A "flying seminar on the future of news"

Jay Rosen (no relation) at NYU has collected 12 blog posts/articles that encapsulate the best real-time conversations on the future of the news business.  One of my favorite posts in this series appears on Xark!, where Dan Conover addresses the intersection of copyright law, the future of news distribution and commerce in his "2020 Vision: What's Next for News" post:

"Efficient copyright licensing. One irony of our nightmarish copyright “system” is that it serves to prevent the affordable, safe licensing of content. For instance: While everything on Xark is licensed via a CreativeCommons agreement that allows you to republish and remix what you find here for non-commerical purposes, that CC agreement doesn't offer an efficient way for commercial users to buy rights to my content. So long as most copyright acquisition is left to individual, open-ended negotiations between attorneys, I'm unlikely to be offered many small payments for commercial reuse of my content. Creating a system to accomplish that task without individual negotiations could be a breakthrough for the development of a functional information economy."

It's the TARDIS of RSS Feeds

Here's a link to a highly customized Google News search that does nothing but seek out the phrase "Future of" in the headlines of news articles.  At the moment, it points to articles about the "Future of...local newspapers, the World Wide Web, Health Care, Liberalism, the Pub, the GOP, Robotics, Shazam, Voice, Search, software-as-service, Liverpool, Egyptology, bus service, catalog shopping, the left, music, global economy, banking regulation, agriculture, privacy rights in India, the Alamo, banking secrecy, Welsh broadcasting, food, aviation, young lives, diagnostics, TV industry, Wapato Creek, The Stooges, fighting in NHL, participant-driven genomic research..."  So go ahead.  Take a step inside.  No Daleks in sight. 

Top 5 Reasons the Media Love Stories about 'Tomorrow'

Since stories about the future are about might what might happen, not what has happened, they don’t exactly fall into the who/what/when/where/why categories journalists usually aim for.  But what such stories must lack in facts, they make up for in:

1. Importance - Helping people make serious decisions about their lives, health, career, investments

2. Conflict - Change always creates winners and losers and both sides can debate through dueling quotes or on-air exchanges

3. Revelations - Stories about the future usually reflect a problem in the present 

4. Entertainment - Providing a dose of fantasy and escape from the bad news of the day

5. Comfort – The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, so even negative predictions provide a sense of control, reducing fear of the unknown