CNET News reporter Charles Cooper reports in his Coop’s Corner blog on a panel that looked at the impact of information technology on democracy. UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska organized the panel, which included Princeton University professor and 1993 UW CSE PhD Ed Felten and two others. The panel was held as part of a meeting of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences exploring the information technology and the public good.
Ed Felten offered some hopeful comments:
There will be many fewer newspapers…partly due to fact that people can read newspapers from far away. We’ll see smaller outlets which focus on the local and operate in a low-budget way, more like a community paper than a big city newspaper. And we’ll see a lot of non-profit or low-profit punditry.