Some might think newspapers don’t have a future, but the grandest one of them all has an in-house futurist. As FT notes, The New York Times has Michael Rogers in place as “futurist-in-residence.” FT’s profile of Rogers is pretty straightforward: we get his resume (stints everywhere from Rolling Stone to The Washington Post), a little bit about the others in the team of “technology and computer science hotshots” that R&D head Michael Zimbalist has pulled together at the Times (overdramatic description: “one imagines the early scenes of a Hollywood action film, in which superheroes with diverse talents are assembled for a big mission”), and plenty of examples of “recent innovations.” Rogers talks about how physical newspapers will “probably be around longer than many people expect” and—most tellingly—“envisions the Times as a ‘digital foundry,’” where high-quality content is distributed to a wide variety of media. The Times Reader (which we mentioned earlier today), still in beta, may be the first salvo of a produce-once-publish-everywhere campaign.
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—NYT: No Decision Yet on Charging for Times Reader?