Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Column: Daily Iowan perseveres despite relocating newsroom after floods
By Christopher Patton
The Daily Iowan, U. Iowa
July 18, 2008

The world is my office, library, and entertainment center. As long as an Internet connection is available, I can use any computer to access most of my work-related and personal files as well as a significant percentage of humanity's collective knowledge base.

According to Arthur C. Clarke, a famous author and inventor who died earlier this year, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I appreciate the profundity of that maxim daily as the feats I am able to accomplish armed only with my slim laptop and versatile mobile phone would have belonged only in the pages of a science-fiction novel as recently as a few decades ago. And I'd likely get burned at the stake for witchcraft if my electronics and I were somehow transported back a few hundred years into the past. But these technologies remain in their infancy. In coming years, complex tasks requiring more computational power than is currently available to most users, such as rapidly generating high-definition video and audio files, will become trivially simple and cheap.

Though many of my coworkers at The Daily Iowan have suffered through my rants on this topic many times, it took the unfortunate events of this summer to really prove my point. This year's unprecedented flooding has caused such terrible hardship for so many in our community that the difficulties it has created for those of us working for the DI have likely escaped many people's notice. But we have been operating without an ordinary newsroom for most of the summer.

Even as we were reporting on the floodwaters' relentless rise, my coworkers and I got word that the Adler Journalism Building, which is our regular headquarters, would likely flood and thus had to be evacuated. The intense effort everyone exerted in relocating our computers, phones, and other essential equipment to safer locations made me proud to be part of such an organization. Just as we were finishing our flood preparations, I had to dash off to the daily UI briefing on the worsening situation.

After the press conference concluded, my coworkers and I went about the task of locating a temporary newsroom from which we could resume operations. We settled on a computer lab in Schaeffer Hall as the best option, rolled up our sleeves, and got back to our regular jobs. Regardless of our collective belief that we owed our readers the best coverage we could deliver, moving forward would have been significantly more difficult if the flood had take place just a few years earlier.

The management at the Gazette has graciously provided space for a handful of our personnel to operate the computer workstations we simply cannot do without. Most of my coworkers and I, however, have been doing all our work in ordinary computer labs or on our own machines. Because we don't have access to our regular equipment or software, we have been using a free service called Google Docs to compose and edit our articles. This powerful tool is an online word processor run through a web browser. Google stores all documents created with its software on its servers so those who create them can access them from any computer connected to the Internet as well as share and simultaneously edit them with any other user.

Such web-based applications have only become available quite recently as the speed and sophistication of the Internet have increased at a breathtaking pace. Google can afford to offer such experimental services at no cost because the resources required to run them are becoming insignificant due to the exponentially increasing power and decreasing cost of computation and storage capacity. If current trends remain in place as long as most engineers predict, mindbogglingly powerful clusters of computers will soon be available to anyone who cares to use them - basically for free.

What long-term economic, political, and social changes will result from such widespread empowerment? I don't know. But because an ambitious group of college students can use 2008's trickle-down technology to create the quality of product we've been putting out this summer, there's no question a few more years of exponential progress will drastically reduce the barriers to entry into every conceivable communications and computation-based market.

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