It is just a routine NASA press release, but one with a sort of "beginning of the beginning of the end" feel to it:
"NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students, and researchers."
Nothing to worry about there. Everybody from grade-schoolers to science-magazine editors have benefited tremendously from NASA's open access to astronomy and spaceflight images and information through its various web pages, such as Planetary Photojournal.
It was another sentence, farther down in the press release, that made me feel as if the world I inhabit — astronomy journalism — had just shifted ever so slightly on its axis:
"In addition, Internet Archive will work with NASA to create a system through which new imagery will be captured, catalogued and included in the online archive automatically."
Did that say "automatically"? Suddenly I felt like John Henry when he heard the first distant clank of the steam-driven spike-driving machine.
Come with me on a brief walk down career memory lane and I'll explain.
When I started reporting professionally on science — about 1990 — there was no public Internet to speak of. We certainly did not have instant access to hundreds of thousands of images from NASA's filing cabinets. To obtain scientific imagery, you had to get a press person on the phone. Then the press contact would mail it or — gasp! — overnight it at great cost. Later, we started to receive floppy disks with these new-fangled things on them called jpegs, gifs, and tiffs. Then — literally bit by bit — online acquisition of images became possible. Finally, the broadband Internet allowed us to download huge publication-quality files.
Science readers had to go through us to get to the gold. We were the gatekeepers of NASA imagery. Now, to some extent, readers still do have to go through us. When amazing new images from Hubble become available, they get released to the media first. Most people see the really amazing stuff for the first time on TV. These are the "pretty pictures" that, presumably, draw readers to magazine covers on the newsstands. In the magazine — or on a web site — we provide more explanation and background to go with the image.
If NASA distributes the latest space-telescope and other cutting-edge images automatically, the media lose their monopoly. What's left in a world of broadband Internet and no image gatekeepers?
Those of us with mortgages might hope that our insightful, entertaining, and creative explanations of the pretty pictures provide enough "added value" to make up for our loss of monopoly on distribution of the images themselves.
It will probably be a healthy change. When we're lazy, we let the tail wag the dog and behave as if the pretty pictures are all people really want. We may be tempted to treat the text like obligatory icing or space-filler.
Studies suggest this is true to some extent. People often read magazines "pictorially." National Geographic knows that. But what happens when anyone can see the latest pretty pictures from space as soon as they exist? Will they need us? The writer in me thinks so. I just hope my readers do, too.