The extremely far future of journalism

December 30, 2020 12:51 PM

I want to write a somewhat goofy story set on board a space ship. I want a mediocre journalist character as a heroine. But it seems preposterous to imagine that media, and journalists, would still exist in any recognisable way in that kind of space opera future. Is it??
posted by Omnomnom to Grab Bag (30 answers total)

So, my first thought goes to the "old journalism" where hot news of the day may have passed along via (silly/memorable) songs (some existing yet today as folk ballads) or acted out by street performers in some form. Not sure what that means for the future but maybe it could inspire something!
posted by hannahelastic at 1:00 PM on December 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

Unless the technology in your story is sufficiently advanced enough to beam other people's opinions directly brain to brain there will always be an intermediary. And there will always be a way to profit by being the intermediary that controls that opinion.
posted by phunniemee at 1:02 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

No way! The Expanse has a journalist (as well as entire plotlines around asynchronous media production), Saturn Run has two major journalist protagonists, An Unkindness of Ghosts has a generation ship with a newspaper... you'll be fine.
posted by teremala at 1:03 PM on December 30, 2020

sometimes in space opera people have to send data around via physical media, because broadcasted information travels at light speed, but there's always some sci-fi technology (hyperdrive, wormholes, whatever) that lets spaceships go faster.

so it makes sense to have spaceships physically carry data from place to place. in a setting like that, journalism is probably more viable than it is on our planet today...
posted by vogon_poet at 1:15 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

So I don't know if journalism will exist, but kind of throughout history there have been powerful people paying for information, tradespeople making offers and requests public, and audiences wanting to hear interesting stories about the world. It's hard to imagine that those human needs will go away, though the exact details of how they're met will probably change a lot.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:23 PM on December 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

The fleet in the Battlestar Galatica reboot had a robust multi-media press, as seen in this press conference scene.

And both the Murderbot series and the Wayfarer series had recognizable newscasts that popped up a various narrative points. So, there’s definitely a place for journalism in sci-fi.
posted by chrisulonic at 1:27 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

Jake Sisko eventually became a journalist, and even covered the Dominion War from behind enemy lines!
posted by General Malaise at 2:04 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

If you were handed a copy of a newspaper from the 1800s it would look familiar to you, some 200 years later. Why wouldn't people 200 years from now have need of some form of journalism?

What might change is the journalist's motivation / what type of organization they report for, and if you're envisioning a post-capitalist society or not. Maybe journalists now work for the government and are supposed to report on specific topics for the good of society. Maybe the government is evil and oppressive and journalism is something that is done secretly and distributed quietly. You can have a lot of fun with the concept.

If society has changed dramatically then it'd be a mistake to make "the media" operate the same way and be motivated by the same things (ratings, money). So if you want to show progress in humanity at all then you have to show how it'd impact the profession of journalism, but I don't doubt that there will be some form of journalism in the far future.
posted by jzb at 2:11 PM on December 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Spaceships will have plumbers. No one wants a clogged toilet in space.
There'll be janitorial service, ,laundry etc
Lister was a vending machine repairman on Red Dwarf
Most crew will never set foot on the bridge

So yeah a mediocre "journalist" or P.R. flack is entirely possible. The military has press officers , photographers etc, governments ,corporations employ thousands of them
No one is going to win a Pulitzer but hey, it's a job, spewing the organization's line .
posted by yyz at 2:19 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

...sometimes in space opera people have to send data around via physical media, because broadcasted information travels at light speed...

The Ansible begs to differ.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:22 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

if ships travel too quickly around the 'verse then they are sorta like commuter train, or an elevator, and wouldn't need their own onboard journalist in the same way as a ship that takes weeks or months or years. If there isn't space-magic for faster than light travel then they are just bringing the history of one place to another place. Is the journalist covering the ship? or documenting things that happen in other places and traveling on the ship? An aspiring spatial media influencer gets a scoop?

humans dig aggregated/collated information. that's why we are here, yeah?

i sorta picture media turning into The Festival and just roaming the universe looking for entertainment and information sharing.
posted by th3ph17 at 2:37 PM on December 30, 2020

I think there will be record-keepers, and I think there will likely be journalists. Journalists select the important facts from the flow of information, seek corroboration, and frame the story. So, carry on.
posted by theora55 at 2:37 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

I don't read a lot of sci-fi, but the ones I've read, many of the titles mentioned here, have some form of journalism in them. An uncharitable part of me thinks that writers can't imagine a future without writing, but I think the real reason is that journalists (like detectives) are mobile characters that can be easily sent into any situation and interact with a wide range of characters.

It sounds like you might be trying to talk yourself out of writing your story before you start. You may as well try it before deciding it doesn't work.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:41 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I think the need for journalism would exist, it just probably isn't profitable/something you can do for pay as a job. I think the concept/need for news is always going to be there, it's just that the business of it may work very differently.

I would imagine a space journalist to be some kind of equivalent of an independent blogger, probably/possibly working for advertising or just doing it for free on the side while working a terrible day job (I dunno, space plumber). Or they're the space equivalent of an influencer. Or they're working for the government and have to deliver propaganda. Or they work for an advertising agency and every article they write has to plug certain products and has to get enough eyeballs/hits/sales in order to make money in order for the journalist to keep her job. Maybe it's like car salesmen and if you don't sell enough within a month, you get fired at the end of the month, which is what a friend of mine said happened to her kid when he tried car sales. Maybe everyone works for whuffie instead of money.

(Disclaimer: former journalist, misses the job but is glad not to be trying to make a living in the industry now).
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:47 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

Big generation ship. There will be mafia, and there will be information brokers, they will need sources and spies. Journalists by another name, just depends on who you're telling the news stories to.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:52 PM on December 30, 2020

Maybe journalists will be something like Chris Tucker's character in The Fifth Element, a combination of entertainer, reality show host, and journalist.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:52 PM on December 30, 2020

Steel Beach rifs on The Front Page and His Girl Friday
posted by kokaku at 2:53 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

The fleet in the Battlestar Galatica reboot had a robust multi-media press, as seen in this press conference scene.


This is particularly relevant since they would likely be a relatively duff bunch of press if they were covering the Secretary of Education's press conference when the cylons attacked.
posted by biffa at 3:53 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Far future space opera setting means worlds are further apart, with both travel and communication more tenuous than at any time since the Age of Exploration. Somebody needs to have boots on the ground (or in space) to tell The Folks Back Home just what exactly is going on in Andromeda or the Oort Cloud or whatever. I agree the nature of the business might need to change -- maybe they're working for the Space Government, or on retainer for a trillionaire -- but the need for reliable information and interesting stories will always be with us.
posted by Rhaomi at 5:48 PM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

Babylon 5’s news broadcast, ISN, played a significant part in several of the series’ arcs.
posted by Morfil Ffyrnig at 6:58 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

In N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series (super duper far future, maybe, post-post-post-post-Apocalypse) there's a societal role “lorist” somewhat like a griot or skald except that the ones depicted in the books pretty clearly followed journalistic or academic research principles, IIRC.

So maybe a blending of what we'd call journalism and entertainment could also make it feel less anachronistic in a space opera setting?

Though you can definitely pull off a more twentieth-century journalism aesthetic too, it just always feels a bit out of place to me unless it's obviously a state or corporate propaganda vector like in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.
posted by XMLicious at 7:34 PM on December 30, 2020

You might need to stretch the role of 'journalist' in your universe, but yeah, people telling each other facts and stories isn't going anywhere; it's a fundamental human thing to do that's been a Job for a really long time, and I doubt will go anywhere anytime soon. Its format changes, a ton but it happens no matter what.

Like, are things more hyper fragmented information wise than they are now? Things could get pretty rediculous as info-tainment sort of creeps more and more, and to get any sort of journalism done you might need some other way to grab views. I always kinda thought that Ruby Rhod in the 5th element was as sorta as good as it got for journalism in that universe. Kim Stanley Robinson had a character like that in his New York 2140 book; sort of a patreon supported, view based youtube personality that ran a wildlife-ish show.

More centralized for some technological bottleneck reason or slow information transfer? People might need longer-form, in-depth journalism as a necessity of conducting business and getting shit done. The argument could also be made that Ford Prefect from hitchhikers is also sort of fit a journalist-adjacent role; more like a longform magazine writer.
posted by furnace.heart at 8:30 PM on December 30, 2020

Transmetropolitan does a great job with far-future journalism—which it handles by mostly sidestepping the changes in reading technology (we know people are reading on devices we wouldn't really recognize, but the story spends little time on this) and focusing on what doesn't change: the need for curious, dogged people who will hold power to account. Warren Ellis has recently been held to account for a pattern of manipulative/predatory relationships, so I can't recommend giving him money, but if it's something you can get your hands on without buying it, it's basically a ten-volume treatise on what journalism will look like in the future.
posted by babelfish at 10:05 PM on December 30, 2020

Best answer: You could have all sorts of fun with this, depending on what the point of the character and story is - a journalist who is partially AI and is mostly concerned with finding the patterns and shapes and contours of aggregation of events, one who is avowedly non-objective and interventionist and specifically tries to distort and frame things from the perspective of their species and societal agenda, one who's a louche dilettante who's traveloguing as a way to kill time in a post-scarcity society ...actually all of the reasons people report now still seem pretty plausible in a space operatic world!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:57 PM on December 30, 2020 [3 favorites]

Depends on what you mean by "journalism."
Star quality -- the reporter or the subject matter -- Ruby Rhod From "The Fifth Element."
Manipulating public opinion -- Rita Skeeter from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."
Field studies sent back by a reluctant ambassador -- Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan from "The 13th Warrior."

Is the objective for reporting primarily information, entertainment, or influence? Base the character study on that.
posted by TrishaU at 5:09 AM on December 31, 2020

It’s hard to answer this without knowing anything about your future society. We don’t even know if it’s set in 50 or 5000 years time.

It’s definitely possible there will be journalists! It’s also possible your world wouldn’t have journalists. Maybe the government has banned all media it doesn’t control (which might mean “journalists” work secretly). Maybe there’s no way for someone doing that role to make money.

I think you need to come up with your world first. How it works, what it’s like, who has power and who doesn’t, what do people do, what do they know, etc. Only then can you answer the question of whether there are journalists, and related questions (e.g. how do they earn money, if your society has money? Do they work for someone? Who? How do people read/see/hear/think the journalists’ work?).
posted by fabius at 5:13 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

Alternatively, if you’re set on having a journalist as a character you can do it “backwards”. Come up with a future society in which the exact kind of journalist you want exists! Social media has been banned so journalists are the only way that anyone hears anything other than face-to-face gossip! You have total freedom.
posted by fabius at 5:22 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think capitalism has led you to believe journalism will die because it's not profitable but is that really the future?
posted by warriorqueen at 7:40 AM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah, stretch 'journalism' to 'Official Communications Agent' or 'Shaman Ambulante' or some-such: be willing to combine with other cultural/societal roles (a journalist would pair well with educator, for example - after all, today we're pairing journalist with entertainers and activists, so ...) as well as split up some journalistic roles (I could see a world where the 'fact-gatherer' function is strictly cordoned off from 'interpreter', which could be, itself, cabined off from 'reporter', where one just finds a pleasing way to communicate what the other has decided to emphasize). You might want to look at historical (but not ancient) cultures that treat 'news' in different ways (look at Marxist interpretations of media, or perhaps a light history/overview of Pravda and/or stiob), and that might give you some ideas.
posted by pseudophile at 8:55 AM on December 31, 2020

Response by poster: I think I'm having a failure of imagination that's colliding with a crisis of confidence in my previous profession, heh.

Thanks for the answers! I've marked those answers best that got me excited about writing this story again, but they were all thoughtful and helpful!
posted by Omnomnom at 10:25 AM on December 31, 2020