Rheingold delivered the keynote address this morning on "Way New Journalism" to an auditorium of professional journalists, educators and journalism students. Rheingold said the responsibility of spreading the doctrine of the digital revolution lies primarily in the hands of the journalist. So far, he said, that task has been largely unfulfilled.
"I don't want to see another story about a cybercad who broke someone's heart on the internet," he said to the audience. "Where are the stories about Congressional bills that mandate government intrusion into our electronic communication?"
"We are sinking our democracy in ignorance," he said. "Every journalist needs to be an evangelist."
Despite his billing as a "futurist," Rheingold himself is not an evangelist. He does, however, give a spell-binding sermon. As long as interest in the "digital revolution" is matched by an ignorance and fear of its ramifications, Rheingold will continue to pack the benches in boardrooms, campuses and news rooms.
Resplendent in a red jacket, purple pants, yellow shirt and hand painted Doc Martins boots, Rheingold wears his idiosyncrasies on his sleeve.
"I am iconoclastic," he said. "The bright clothes and painted shoes are me."
"They are also a gimmick."
The "gimmick" works. Those boots -- decorated with flames, planets and stars -- have stood in the boardrooms of some of the world's largest media and electronic corporations, commanding $7,500 for the privilege. Rheingold's success as the informed court jester of the "futurist" circuit stands in stark contrast to the freelance writer who plunged headlong into the online world circa1985
"After twenty years of being treated like a piece of shit as a freelance writer, they're now picking me up in limos," he told a room full of journalism students over lunch.
Rheingold is a calm eye in the tornado of hype that is blowing down the status-quo of journalism.
"There is a fundamental need for journalism in emerging technology," he said. "The newspaper is not going to go away."
Although the medium is different, Rheingold said that fundamental tenements of journalism remain the same.
"The only difference is that the mechanism of delivery is different," Rheingold said. The notion of journalists publishing independently is both scary and exciting to the profession.
"Right now there are a bunch of amateur journalists out the (on the Internet)," he said. For the medium to establish its mass market credibility, trained journalists will be needed to responsibly disseminate information.
"The byline has almost disappeared," he said.
Rheingold predicted that consumers of online information will gravitate toward individual sources of news. He used the example of a $50 used computer, a modem and an anonymous phone line sending information back from the front lines in Port Au Prince, Haiti. Rheingold's homepage on the World Wide Web underscores this point. It gets upwards of 500 hits, or visitors, a day.
By carving out his own idiosyncratic niche on the digital domain, Rheingold has secured a personally satisfying -- and very profitable -- pulpit for himself.