Discussions at this event focused primarily on the profound changes taking place in the news and publishing industry. It was remarked that, on the one hand, the industry is having to respond to competitive pressures common to other sectors, first and foremost being the search for efficiency gains in a globalized market, and, on the other, editorial product is undergoing an extraordinary transformation wrought by technological innovation. The members of the Aspen Junior Fellows group taking part in the debate at this Meeting acknowledged their status as the first “digital generation” (the so-called “Generation Y” or “Millennials”, born from the mid-1980s onwards), and their role as key players in both the cloudification of traditional content and a digital economy where readers have also become authors. Indeed, in the age of e-books, it was felt that whatever the future might hold for physical books and libraries can be gleaned from the inclinations and judgments of this generation. The changes which it has helped steer have seen what – up until a few years ago – involved the production and distribution of a single edition of newspapers per day turn into a continuous flow of information on tablet screens. This was regarded as posing questions about the kind of economic model that a market still beholden to principles of freedom of access and free access to digital content should gravitate towards.
It was further observed that in this revolutionary scenario, where information and culture are increasingly conveyed through strings of bits, new competitors to traditional publishers are emerging. As these players change, so too is news itself, even in terms of its pivotal role as a fundamental resource of democracy. In this regard, the participants pointed to the decision tweeted on 20 August 2014 by the CEO of Twitter to suspend the accounts of users that had posted images of the beheading of the journalist James Foley. For the first time, a social network knowingly exercised editorial discretion, something which up till that point had only happened in the newsrooms of major newspapers or television networks. Figures were cited forecasting that, by 2020, there will be around 20 billion devices connected to the internet, ready to communicate and share information in real time, outside traditional news channels and often indexed by algorithms, with the potential for more marketable items (for instance, those garnering the most “likes”) to overshadow important news stories. This was viewed as raising doubts regarding “net neutrality” and the advisability of leaving editorial control of information to algorithms and automated processes. The participants felt that the key question here hinges on the balance to be struck between, on the one hand, the freedom of all users to generate more information, and, on the other editorial control, or more importantly, whether that control should be exercised by people or mathematical models. The resulting implications for democracy were also deemed worthy of attention.
In conclusion, it was submitted that the profound transformation being witnessed in the news and publishing industry, and the peculiar nature of the product it generates, call for responsible and capable leaders to reconcile a number of competing considerations, namely: universal, personal and social values, economic value and technological innovation, the advancement of freedom of choice, and the preservation of democratic principles.