 Well, good afternoon. My name is Richard Roth. I am the journalist and dean at Northwestern University in Takak. First of all, when you think about, can you see the future? Well, some people can see the future. At least it looks like they can. Here on the screen, oh, it's on the screen now. Is the screen working? Yes. Okay. In 1879, three years after Bell invented the telephone, a French seer, futurist and Albert Robendal, began to think about what that might mean for the future. And here's what, in this cartoon posted in Punch Magazine, when Robendal saw, he saw the telephone as a videoconferencing device. Big screen. You can see that the man on the left is holding what was done, the telephone and the microphone, talking from London to his daughter in Saigon, a big videoconference. And they're talking back and forth, he's asking a question about who is this other girl in the picture there. Robendal also, 140 years ago, saw home entertainment, a big plaza on the screen, with entertainment. You see the family sitting around and enjoying this. So, people do see the future. They do understand sometimes. Then, here's a quote from an American journalist. Every American journalist should probably has read the autobiography of William Allen White. Well, here in 1931, he was a great Kansas editor. Here's what he says, Of course, as long as man lives, someone will have to fill the Herald's way. Someone will have to do the bell rings work. Someone will have to tell the story of the day's news and the year's happenings. A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity. But whether the reporter's story will be printed in type upon press, I don't know. I seriously doubt it. I think most of the machinery now employed at printing the days, the weeks, or the months doings will be jumped by the end of this century and will be as archaic as the bell ringers bell by the Herald's trumpet. New methods of communication, I think, will supersede the old. Solvitz, Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, as he's called the great American investor, said just two years ago, simply put, if cable and satellite broadcast, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed. And then this is the chairman of the New York Times said two years ago, I don't really know, but it will be printing the times in five years. And you know what? I don't care. Now you may have read the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. There's a story in there that lays out what is a plausible theory that the New York Times will cease publication as a newspaper in May of this year because of its huge debt load and the convergence of being able to pay it. It's a pretty scary idea that the New York Times, well, it may happen. Well, how will people get their news? What will happen with the Times? Solverger has been saying for a long time, we're not a newspaper company, we're an information company. So there are these other ways of the times being distributed. Kindle now, this little handout device, because the Times published digitally, it can be uploaded to the Kindle to read your times there. You can of course read newspapers on a cell phone. It is, you've heard the conversation this morning about cell phones, it is our belief in Northwestern that this is the device of the future for delivering news. Our students here will be taught how to produce news for the small screen, video, text, whatever. It's there now, it's how I read my news. Then there's the new iPod Touch, the bigger screen for downloading and reading newspapers. And then there's this one. It's the magic of something called e-ink. The New York Times can be delivered to your serial box or to any other device. There's simply a wired satellite receiver inside, this thin thing, and it collects. E-ink now exists, it's being tested all over the US. And so when you have your serial box in the morning, maybe you could sit and read the Times on that. And then there's maybe another way to get the Times. At Northwestern, we set out a couple of years ago, about four years ago, to think about this convergence of information and web and our computer scientists there, what happened, developed a program whereby the program goes out to the web every day and starts with the New York Times and then we pick five or six other publications of importance for it to look at. And it sees the biggest stories. What do they all agree on? The big stories. It then pulls that story into the computer, rewrites it into broadcast style, by itself, nobody will touch us, anything. And then it measures how much of that story is being talked about by the bloggers. And then it goes up to the blogger's figure and finds what the bloggers are saying about this news event, crowd-resourcing, and it brings that story back. And it hands the story off to an avatar who then presents the story without a human ever touching it. Let's see if we can make this work. And I'll show you an example. This is a couple of people. Hi, I'm Alice Bass, and welcome to News at 7, a daily produced automated news show. This is the news for July 9th, 2007. President Bush and Woods executive privileged Monday to deny requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides in connection with the firings of federal prosecutors. The White House, however, did offer again to make former counsel Harriet Myers and one-time political director Sarah Taylor available for private, off-the-record interviews. In a letter to the heads of the House and Senate Judiciary panel, White House counsel Fred Fielding insisted that Bush was acting in good faith and refused lawmakers' demand that the president explain the faces for invoking the privilege. Now, from the blogger's sphere. Slow down and hear me out. It is no secret that I opposed the Myers nomination. I also do not believe the theory that this was some horrible miscarriage of justice. I do not think conservative opinion makers were responsible for her withdrawal. People have a constitutional right to free speech. They have the constitutional right to pressure both the Congress and the executive with any verbal tool they feel like using. I think this demonstrates strength of character in participation in government. Thanks for hearing me out. Thank you, sir. Thanks for watching. If you would like us to announce something or say hi to someone, please follow the contact link at the top of news at 7.com. Don't be shy. Thanks for watching everyone and have a great day. Bye-bye. You should know that this program is now much fancier now with a different avatar. But it's now not on the web because a big American media company has bought it from. Because it thinks maybe this is how it can deliver its news and not be dire reporters. I guess. So, all of this stuff, what does it say? Is it saying print is dead? Well, Munner, you heard him say a few minutes ago. He thinks it's dead in two or three years. But there's some indication that it's alive and going to be alive. Here, there's a Chicago Tribune. Chicago Tribune on the left is the one you see on the newsstands all the time. The one on the right is a new product that Tribune created for young people, 18 to 25. It's handed out at the Elf Stops, the Subway Stops. And some people buy it at home. But they're getting, they have 750,000 of these out every week. It is sold out and advertised. They fixed the size of it at the outset and said it's not going to be a tabloid. It's this thick because young people don't want it that thick. It has to be no more than 80 pages or whatever. Some growth of a small number. And they sold out the advertising in it. It's print dead. Look at this magazine created in the 21st century. Three and a half million sold now. You may remember it started out as once every two months. Now it's monthly huge. I can't see if it's in there. There was another one there. Well, I was going to show you an example here. It's the one on that screen, probably not of a new magazine created in Doha. That New Orleans publishing company called Glam. It's hot right now with the young people like it. So here's the deal. Circulation of newspaper, paid newspapers has increased in the last year and a half worldwide. New newspapers being founded up every day in India. There's a new one. One since I started coming to Doha. New here, the Qatar Tribune. 99 billion sold every day in India. 107 billion sold in China. Japan. It's paid circulations three times out of the U.S. and on average they cost three times as much. Newspapers circulation in the U.S. is falling and falling fast. It's in 25 years. It's gone from 63 million to 50 million. It's going down. And one of the things that Leonard said and what I want to do while I'm here is to help this region avoid the crisis that will probably be falling if it doesn't brace for it, doesn't begin to adapt the new technologies to the web. We're going to help our students are being trained for the future and I think it will happen here. Not in three or four years in my judgment of the way Leonard thinks but perhaps in 30 or 40 years. It won't be newspapers. They'd be way faster than that. But people are clearly more of them and more of them every day getting their news on their cell phones. I don't want to be prepared for that. Anyway, that's my ten minutes.