You’re sleeping peacefully in your warm soft bed, while downstairs, your electronic gizmos decide to have a meeting. (Think of it as “The Brave Little Toaster” meets “Network.”)
 
“I can do anything you can do better,” says the DV camcorder to the TV/VCR.
 
“Perhaps, but not without me,” admonishes the Pentium PC.
 
After failing to start a conversation with the sleek little MP3 player, your cassette deck visits your liquor cabinet and polishes off the remnants of a bottle of Jamesons.
 
Farfetched? Yes, but any more so than NPR reporters breaking news photos worldwide?
 
It’s called convergence, and if your job touches anything in or associated with the news media, you are affected. A report on MSNBC’s web site goes so far as to claim the trend is encouraging a new breed of war correspondents. The evidence is a photo, shot by NPR news correspondent Steve Inskeep, of an Afghan man displaying the money he reportedly received from U.S. military officials as compensation for his brothers’ death during a commando raid gone awry.
 
“For the past year, NPR has been asking its radio reporters to lug digital cameras and video cameras on assignment as a way of enhancing its Web site,” the article reports. “Reporters are not required to add cameras to their usual bag of sound recorders, but the station’s push for a greater Web presence has made incorporating multimedia into its reports inevitable.”
 
In Washington D.C., WJLA is teaming up with the 24-hour, local cable news network NewsChannel 8. A piece in the Washington Times says the merger of newsrooms will create Washington’s largest local TV news operation with about 185 employees “or roughly 65 more workers than the typical big-city TV newsroom.”
 
According to the article, the merger is key to WJLA’s long-term success. Each operation will have its own news director and separate advertising departments, but they will share camera operations, editors, technicians and other behind-the-scenes staffers.
 
The trend toward convergence says more about the business end of the news media than about news reporting itself. Corporations have long been “re-allocating”  and “redeploying assets”  to wring more bucks from whatever business they happen to be in. But now it’s happening to people who communicate for a living, and some aren’t happy with the prospects.
 
At the Phoenix News Times web site, writer Robert Nelson, moans over the loss of newspaper people who appear geeky but are great at what they do. “I fear we’ll all be gone soon,” he predicts in response to convergence experiment undertaken by media giant Gannett among local newspapers and TV stations.
 
“Basically, the idea is to swap newsroom personnel between newspapers and sister television stations,” Nelson writes. “Television inherits the depthier reporting of print journalism; newspapers get access to that expanding audience of ingrates who only get their news from television.”
Nelson argues that convergence may be great business, but it damages journalism. “As two sources of information become one, the community loses another independent newsgathering source. The number of opinions dwindles, the number of sacred cows rises.”
 
“It’s great for television news, great for newspaper marketing and awful for both the marketplace of ideas and the marketability of talented geeks, who, from my experience, are the bedrock of quality print journalism in America,” says Nelson.