This item, recently shared on Facebook by a New Mexico journalist, helps illustrate our new expectations for communication in the digital age. The exchange is between a customer and Syl, a circulation rep:

Customer: “May I have today’s paper?”
Syl: “Sure!”
Customer: “And can I also have tomorrow’s as well?”
Syl: “I don’t have tomorrow’s yet, not until tomorrow.”
Customer: (In a disappointed voice): “Oh, you don’t?”

The customer may be even more disappointed to find out that “today’s” paper is actually yesterday’s news because most newspapers are scheduled to hit the press before midnight. We used to call it The 24-hour Miracle – marveling at the compressed amount of time we had to gather, write, edit, layout, process and then print pages and pages of fresh information and get it to the readers’ doorsteps before sunrise for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. Then we’d do it all over again the next day – a frenetic, full-on sprint to the next set of deadlines.

Now that process seems glacial. People carry phones and tablets that update instantly when news hits the web. Our friends and family have become publishers on social media. We expect real time coverage of public events as soon as we hear about them. Is it any surprise, then, that readers are now starting to expect us to predict the future?

Might be why the Miami Herald turned to The Amazing Kreskin for Tomorrow’s News Today an annual feature of Kreskin’s predictions for the future along with a scorecard on how he fared in earlier predictions. Maybe we should move the horoscopes out to the front page?