The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

Scenarios for journalism in 2018:
(i) "It was all a bad dream". The resurgence of traditional media.
(ii) "Blogland". The triumph of new media, but suppporting serious journalism.
(iii) "Twittered away". The triumph of new media, but racing for the bottom.

Why are audiences and advertisers deserting traditional media? Do they want something similar and better, or something quite different? What do we do for information when we don't read newspapers? Are social networks in the news business? Are blogs peaking? Which will seem more dated in 20 years—newspapers, or computer screens?

Barbara Crossette was The New York Times bureau chief at the United Nations from 1994 to 2001. She was earlier a Times chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia and a diplomatic reporter in Washington. She is the author of several books on Asia, including "So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas," and a collection of travel essays about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a century after their creation, "The Great Hill Stations of Asia." In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, "India: Old Civilization in a New World," for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of "India Facing the 21st Century." Ms. Crossette is now a travel essayist and a freelance writer on foreign policy and international affairs. Her articles and essays appear periodically in World Policy Journal, published by The World Policy Institute in New York. You can find more information about Ms. Crossette here.

Craig Unger, an award-winning investigative reporter and author based in New York, is the best-selling author of "House of Bush, House of Saud" (2004), and "The Fall of the House of Bush" (2007). His work has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and many other publications, and he is currently a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. He is also a Fellow at The Center on Law and Security at NYU’s School of Law. His work was featured in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and he has appeared as an analyst on CNN, The Charlie Rose Show, NBC’s Today Show, National Public Radio, ABC Radio, Air America, and many other broadcast outlets.

Edward Lucas is the Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist. He has been covering the region for more than 20 years, witnessing the final years of the last Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire, Boris Yeltsin's downfall and Vladimir Putin's rise to power. From 1992 to 1994, he was the managing editor of The Baltic Independent, a weekly English-language newspaper published in Tallinn. He holds a BSc from the London School of Economics, and studied Polish at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. The New Cold War is his first book.

What (if anything) distinguishes a professional journalist from his amateur rivals in an age of blogs and citizen news? What is his economic value, when most information is available for nothing? What is accuracy worth, and to whom? How many newsrooms will exist in five or ten years' time, and how many jobs for dedicated journalists? Who still wants to do such a job, and why?