I’ve seen so much change in the years I’ve been around, and been inspired by it, that it’s difficult for me to imaging the future sometimes without my head exploding.

I remember sitting at a desk in my bedroom when I was i
n my 20s with one of the first PCs being mass produced, an IBM clone, that by today’s standards couldn’t do much, but back then felt like pure and utter magic.

I was the only one who I knew who had a computer. I set the trend. I mostly played Dungeons and Dragons games on it. There wasn’t a lot else to do. There was no real internet yet. It had a modem, but unless you were calling Compuserve, there wasn’t much to offer.

But I used one at work and I was entranced from the first time I laid eyes on it. I had to have it.

Many years after that, I remember sitting on a swing with my ex, looking up places we had lived on the maps feature of the original, first version iPhone. There weren’t a lot of apps–the App Store hadn’t been invented yet, so there wasn’t much to do, but we nevertheless sat on that porch swing until the battery was dry. I was just as entranced as the day I saw my first PC.

They couldn’t do much at the time, but maybe I saw the promise of those new technologies and had a momentary glance into the future–what it could be once those two devices could progress and develop into what they have become today.

What I couldn’t imagine that day back in the late 1980s playing games on my PC with an orange monochrome screen was the threat that it represented to an industry I would one day be part of. I couldn’t imagine the shuttering of newspaper offices, the laying off of friends, the decreased quality if journalism overall as the industry tried to recover from the suckerpunches dealt by the promises of new platforms that ended up nearly killing it.

It’s been good then, for me to see hope, from the emerging media class, but also from the master’s program as a whole–Journalism Innovation–which has taught me that the death knell has quieted. There will always be threats, but journalism will continue, in one form or another. We’ve survived the worst of it, and with new technologies are reinventing the news.

What’s the future hold? Promise. Will VR be the next big thing? Probably, but there will be another big thing after that. And another. And another. And another one after that.

I don’t have the foresight to see what all those advancements will be. But I do know that whatever the technology, some simple truths and rules will prevail. Stories will be told. They’ll have a beginning, a middle and an end. They will contain truthiness and will withstand ethical scrutiny. And behind the stories will be people like me and the crew I work with, there because they have a simple passion for telling stories.
 

As often as I find myself feeling incredibly left behind by some new technology or other, I have to remind myself of the incredible strides my colleagues and I have made since I first became a journalist some 20 years ago.

We’ve embraced the digital distribution of the news, and luckily for me, I’ve always had a fascination with technology and was able to adapt (with a lot of bumps along the way) to most advances in the field.

Even so, my head spins with the frequency of new tech advances lately. It just seems that once you wrap your head around one thing, something totally new emerges to take its place or sit next to it.

So I feel better prepared after taking this class. I know that by the time it’s over, things will change once again, dramatically, but maybe I won’t have that moment of anxiety and denial and will be better able to embrace and explore new things.

Along those lines, it was exhilarating this past weekend to go to the Shinnecock Powwow with my new 360Fly camera and record some 360 video. I felt like a fresh, new, eager reporter again, with butterflies in my stomach and worrying about whether everything would go as planned.

The anxiety continued when I got home and looked at some of the footage. The quality wasn’t what I had hoped, but it was good enough. I trimmed a bunch of clips and joined them together using the Fly software, which doesn’t allow a lot of options. I would have liked to do more to “produce” the video, but maybe that’s kind of the point with 360–it shouldn’t look that produced.

And there there was utter frustration when I couldn’t get the video to upload to YouTube. The Fly software kept timing out. It’s a familiar frustration–one that I’ve felt every time some new software or technology doesn’t cooperate. And maybe that was a little exhilarating, too, one the video actually uploaded.

Overall, I liked shooting the 360 video, and I have to say, it feels pretty damned cool to have 360 video I produced up on the web. And it got a pretty god response in the newsroom, and I was flooded with suggestions about what we could use the camera for.

So I guess it’s part of my tool belt now. I’m the guy in the room with a 360 camera.