Major newspaper companies join MIT research project p.

By: George Garneau

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE of Technology's Media Lab, using funds from 17 newspaper and information companies, is trying to create the newspaper of the future?in whatever form it takes.
The research and development project, called News in the Future (NIF), says it will explore "new means of gathering, filtering and delivering news."
Costing about $2 million a year, it is one of the largest, most ambitious and most cooperative efforts aimed at reinventing newspapers for the computer age.
NIF, modeled after a similar "industrial liaison" project begun in 1989 for the television industry, brings together seven related research efforts under one umbrella, said John Hynes, Media Lab associate director.
About half the sponsors are newspaper companies, a significant departure for an industry notorious for its lack of research and development spending.
"I don't think anything like this has ever happened in the newspaper business before," said Frank Hawkins, a spokesman for Knight-Ridder Inc. In addition to joining the consortium, Knight-Ridder is researching, at its Information Design Lab in Denver, the application of portable computer screens for news display.
Hawkins said the consortium was an acknowledgment that methods of delivering news will change.
"What this suggests is that newspapers are going to continue to play a leading information and news role in their communities, but they will have one or two or three more ways to get to consumers," he said.
The possibilities are so open-ended, and changes are coming so quickly, that it is in the best interests of newspapers to explore as many avenues as possible, Hawkins said.
NIF's chairman is Jerome B. Rubin, the former Times Mirror Co. senior vice president who developed the computerized information services Nexus and Lexus. A 10-person team includes Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, electronic publishing project leader Walter Bender and seven other faculty researchers.
The consortium will work under a five-year agreement.
For about $100,000 a year, sponsors get to meet twice annually with project leaders to set the agenda, receive occasional briefings and have some access to the lab.
The first meeting is set for late July, the cutoff date for sponsors to sign on.
The five-year goal, Negroponte said in announcing the project at a conference in Japan, is to figure out how to program computers to recognize news content and select information to fit a reader's interests.
Multimedia presentations of text, sound and video will integrate news and advertising in "a seamless landscape that ranges from the most serendipitous to the most urgent information," he said.
For Gannett Co. Inc., the new consortium means no change in its $75,000-a-year Media Lab sponsorship.
Other sponsors include Aamulehti Group Inc., ABC Radio Networks and Capital Cities/ABC Publishing Group, Advance Publications Inc. and Newhouse Broadcasting Corp., BellSouth Enterprises Inc., Grupo Consolidado, Globe Newspaper Co., Hearst Corp., International Business Machines, McCann-Ericson, Reed Elsevier PLC, Televisa SA, Times Mirror Co. and the Tribune Co.
The Media Lab said six others were considering joining.