Today’s entry is a guest post by Richard Caesar, news director at UVC-TV 19 and an editor of the Amherst Wire. Richard and I will be attending BCNI Philly on Saturday, April 25.

The degree to which media is changing and the factors that have influenced this change have been surprising in some cases, less so in others. They all, however, indicate that this shift from what the media has been traditionally is far from being complete.

Personalization and unbundling are two trends that show empirically the changes media has gone through to become the product we consume today. More importantly, they give a steady pattern to lay out a possible direction in the future.

In my estimation, the trend of unbundling is probably going to be the most influential going forward. From records to MP3s, each new form of music has made it easier to get to what you want and listen to just that. In cinema, you hardly ever see a theater running a double feature or showing a cartoon before the main feature anymore. Folks just come in to see the one movie they want and barely even have patience for the trailers to upcoming titles which they’ll probably get online anyway. Likewise, unbundling the newspaper ensures that readers can just pay for the section they want to read instead of the whole product.

Following this line of thinking, I see a very real possibility that the media market’s appetite for niche products and marketing will explode. Mainly because so many bundled products will either break up or be broken up by this trend that each facet will find an audience in those people who were just interested in that part of the product. Hence from a public that will have a far greater pool of informational and entertainment resources to choose from, we will be getting media outlets and providers with more and more narrow areas of expertise and function. The media output will probably increase in quality since all these different little providers will be focusing so much effort and resources into smaller and smaller niches.

This plays into another influential trend: personalization. The smaller and more focused the media becomes the more it will become apparent that the ways in which the media reaches individuals needs to become more personalized. This would be to take advantage of the niche media’s effect on the public. Each person would have their own combination of media preferences — it’s quite possible to imagine that 20 years into the future no two people on Earth would have the very same media experience. This trend of personalization would continue, as it has in past, to influence the hardware aspect of the media.

Currently an iPod can play music, surf the internet, view pictures and movies, play games and download all of the aforementioned, not to mention act as a daily planner. If you get an iPhone, you can do all that and have a fully functioning cell phone to boot. My Playstation 3 plays games but it’s also a functioning Blu-Ray player, Internet browser and all around multimedia machine. In twenty years I foresee this trend getting more and more pronounced.

Just as it seems impossible to exist in today’s world without a cell phone, there will be some device that incorporates all media forms that my children will see as indispensable. It will be small enough to be incredibly portable and be able to meet any person’s media needs, be it games, music, movies, photos, general informational tidbits or even news. This “Omni-Media” device will change how information is made available to the average person and allow for every piece of media imaginable to be at your finger tips anytime, anywhere. More than that, these devices will be fully equipped with cameras and microphones. They’ll be fully networked to each other, like the internet does for computers, so you can easily and freely communicate, create and distribute your own media.

In this new world, many old institutions may suffer. Although there may not be as large a market anymore, I still believe that mass media like radio and television will still find a role in this future. Of course, they’ll be vastly different in how they operate and may indeed be unrecognizable to someone who grew up in the “golden age” of radio or TV. Libraries as well may have to change the way they work. I see them becoming immense physical archives that no one visits in person anymore but instead accesses their databases remotely from their O.M. devices to see scans of the original documents. By now, the invention of holographic projectors would eliminate the age-old problem of peering at a tiny screen to read. I believe this may also be the future of newspapers. You choose which sections from which newspapers you wish to receive every morning and they are delivered to you through your O.M. device.

Just imagine: over breakfast you flip through a holo-projection of the Improper Bostonian’s arts & leisure pages and go right into the Sox updates on the Globe’s sports pages, all the while listening to your favorite tracks from your personal playlist. The virtual DJ periodically asks you if you’d like to download some other track by this artist or a similar one that was recorded yesterday and now available for a fee. As you leave the house, you quickly download the traffic update and map it onto the GPS display as you plan your morning commute.

The street reporter’s job will be different. Investigative and political journalists will still be doing their work as usual, since underground contacts and investigative journalistic skills are difficult for the average Joe to develop and politicians will never be willing to expose themselves to questioning from anyone who doesn’t possess learned professional courtesy.

The role of a professional journalist will come to resemble more of a 911 operator. I’ve held the opinion that a journalist’s civic duty can be compared to that of a fireman or paramedic or policeman and in (my version of) the future this similarity is far more visible. Every O.M. device makes a potential reporter out of the ordinary citizen. The citizen journalist mindset would’ve by now been widespread. The reporter’s civic duty to gather and relay information would be shared with the general public as is the policeman’s duty to ensure public safety.

The reporter would sit at his desk and take countless packages of data (stories, pictures and video) sent directly from the public. Some will be good, usable stories only in need of some editing and a little research; others will be unusable garbage from people who can’t quite grasp the concept of news. Maybe additional information is needed and the reporter can either go substantiate the story himself or send an on-call field agent. The content is sorted, categorized and sent off to the editors to be put into the data stream as reported news. Each person would be as much a contributor to the information flow as they are a consumer.