The application of all the new tools by television journalists may make its own revolution in the field of news and news dissemination. Instead of being a news medium which works alongside others, it may in time play a role at the heart of the gathering and reporting of all news, whether it is a print or voice and picture news.
The tremendous electronic hardware it will have to command for its own purposes argues that these facilities might be put to work to do the job of local, national and world-wide news gathering now performed by the wire services like AP, Reuters and UPI. It might become the transmitter of today’s newspaper-instantly and in colour into its viewer’s homes.
It will certainly combine its new capacity to cover the world live with its already established capacity to capitalize on the fabulous data computer, to expand the instant poll (with the help of instant language translators) into an international vehicle.
It goes without saying that the face-to-face dialogue among world leaders which is already feasible will soon be possible on a world scale, and the opportunities it offers for peace and understanding among nations can hardly be ignored in the years ahead by those men in power who hold the fate of humanity in their hands.
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The future of television will be a future which includes more informational programming from a steadily increasing number of television sources, from the present national networks plus commercial networks from the commercial television stations plus new ones in the UHF band, from educational television, and very possibly from Community Antenna Television (CATV) and pay television.
Scientists foresee that in the 1980’s more than half of network prime time will be devoted to informational programming of one kind or another. Whether or not this happens there are going to be more networks and station news time, more budget allocations, larger and more professional news stalls.
It follows that the greater amount of television news will offer solid content more imaginatively produced than it is today, the result that its audiences will be as big if not bigger than they are today.
The all-channel television receiver, soon to be universal, will make UHF (channel numbers 14 to 83) available to all viewers and will speed the proliferation of stations, impeded until now by the scarcity of channels in the VHF band (2 to 13) of the spectrum. This is particularly important in areas which up to this time have had only one or two stations to tune to, but it will mean additional stations in every place that can economically support more than they have now.
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This is likely to open up new avenues for news, information and public affairs, for the viability of some of the new stations will depend on their providing something different. That “something” may be specialisation in news-as some radio stations are already doing-or providing information-and educational programming in subject fields now given short shrift by conventional commercial stations.