(This is a bit shortened version of the Russian text published day before – with a warm welcome for English speakers to participate. Special thanks to Nikolay Sudarikov of Stockholm School of Economics for a translation and kind support).

I am starting a new project, this time about the technology of future journalism. A quarter century ago, in the age of typewriters, linotype machines and analog television, journalist’s toolkit was fairly limited. It was possible to master that production technology in a short time.

Since then, many things have become digital and the analog era seems long gone. We can assume that journalist’s inventory has caught up with time and technology. New tools, initially designed for scientists and business analysts brought us incredible capabilities of data processing and visualization. These are widely used by journalists nowadays.

In this article, I would like to try to categorize the tools that journalists use today.

Let’s start with some technological groups that are core to modern journalism.

Search technologies. These span from general search engines to search prediction technologies. The technology also helps keeping track of news events and watch corporations and newsmakers closely. This is an extension of basic journalism tool.

Aggregation technology. Perhaps, this is the most controversial and complicated aspect of business today. Before digital technology, aggregation didn’t exist – knowing the context of the report was a coincidence or a result of lifelong experience. Today we have a number of services that aggregate the context and let us see the whole picture. Soon, these tools will become a part of CMS. There’s no specific timeframe for “soon”, though.

Reality capture technology. Improvements in data recording and storage technologies provide instant access to the footage and empower journalists to recreate reality. This group also includes global video-hosting websites, location services, speech recognition and tagging software.

Creative technology is not as fast-paced as the previous troika. It is arguably the only part of media production that is hard to automate and put into algorithm. The progress here lies in the expansion of texts with context, data and graphs.

Collaboration technology is a wider group of technologies, which links end-user devices with complex systems and databases.

Education technology. In my opinion, the transition from the “journalist of the past” to the “post-journalist” depends 99% on the personal eagerness to learn, attitude to study methods, and finally, the desire to study. Continuous learning is vital. Traditional schools lag behind in the latest forms of training, while newly created institutions boast success. All these programs are still in the making, so I welcome your suggestions, comments and ideas.

Vasily Gatov

Translated from Russian by Nikolay Sudarikov