The Future of Journalism?

Science Fiction as Journalism? Maybe. I'm experimenting with the concept of putting legitimate news inside a story, and Sci-Fi seemed the easiest way to do it. If this turns out to be feasible I'll try my next idea: integrating poetry and journalism.

Without further adieu,

Nataraja
Chapter One: The Dance

"Look on my works, ye Mighty..."

...and despair.

Vijay knew he'd heard those words somewhere before. Something biblical, maybe? No. A quick Google search on his phone found they were the words of P.B. Shelly speaking through Ozymandias, the Greek name for the Great Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II.

That made sense. Ozymandias was the name of the character speaking. Vijay was beginning the penultimate chapter of Watchmen, and with any luck he'd get through it before his lunch break was over.

"Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs' cut-up technique," read the comic. "He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through..."

That was interesting. Vijay had always seen himself more like The Architect from the Matrix films, a man watching the swarming of every creature that creeped upon earth. But he always knew that was not a completely accurate analogy. As Senior Data Analyst for the Journal, America's foremost right-wing news aggregator, Vijay's job was to try to track every story that ever might break.

A bite of rice. A sip of beer. The job was easier when he was a little loose. Too much concentration and he was liable to miss something.

Ozymandias continued. "...An emergent worldview becomes gradually discernible amidst the media's white noise. This jigsaw fragment model of tomorrow aligns itself piece by piece, specific areas necessarily obscured by indeterminacy. However, broad assumptions regarding this postulated future may be drawn. We can imagine its ambience. We can hypothesize its psychology."

Ozymandias sat before his hundred television screens, each with video screaming for attention. Not unlike Vijay, who for eight hours a day watched a half-dozen computer screens, each swarming with hundreds of dots, each dot representing a story, or at least the possibility of one. The more people who wrote about a subject or linked to an article, the bigger the dots became. Digg and Google had developed similar software in the early 2000s, but the Journal's was more comprehensive. It filtered out information known to be false or untrustworthy, based on parameters Vijay set. The information was still on the Net, but it would not show up on front pages of the Journal.

Liberal, conservative, it didn't matter. Since the earliest days of newspapers it was common for editors to read the work of competitors. Vijay had to watch everything because sometimes liberals were his best friend. Bittergate broke when a blogger supporting Obama spoke about those gun-loving Pennsylvanians. What Vijay was searching for was quality.

This was hard to come by, given the millions of bloggers, hundreds of worldwide news sources, and thousands of citizen journalists "employed" by the World Journal, the best of whom were paid. It was crowd sourcing at its best. It was a nightmare, the staggering amount of false information that was tossed around the pipes, growing faster than bacteria in a petri dish. Part of Vijay's job was pruning: trimming the glut of stories whose information was not correct. He always aired on the side of caution, but there were sites so dastardly that they were banned alltogether.

A constant gardener, Vijay would nurture those stories that were factual and deemed important to the American right-wing. They would be featured in special sections of the Journal (front page if they were lucky), recommended to other sites, forwarded to the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, those last now-endowed bastions of "unbiased" truth in America. Some, not many, of the old papers were still around, most of them online, most of them now with a point of view. That was the only way for them to survive the rough times of the early 2000s.

Times were better now. You could get paid for your stories as a citizen journalist and if you got lucky or wrote well you would be hired by an outlet. Then you could rise up and one day be like Vijay Natarajan, the man whose job was to play god with what you know. He knew the dance of information better than anyone else, predicted patterns others would not see. And he could control it all. Sure, he had to file daily reports accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, but he was an honest man by nature. Very few people were paid to watch the world's data stream, and no one else had technology as strong as the Journal's.