"The high ceiling is meant to inspire lofty thoughts," Michael Rogers jokes as we walk to an unused conference room on the top floor of the new NY Times headquarters, where Rogers and the rest of the Times Company R&D team are headquartered. He's the "futurist-in-residence" at the company, helping to put the prototypes of potential future technologies imagined by the department's engineers into social contexts. It's a role he says he fell into somewhat accidentally through his "Practical Futurist" column for MSNBC. "That's how you become a futurist," he smiles, looking like a much less intense version of Mr. Bennett from Heroes. "You call yourself one."

Rogers has long had one foot in the tech world and the other in the writing world. He studied both physics and creative writing in college, and had job offers from Intel and Rolling Stone after he graduated—a choice, he quips, that was fairly easy to make in the mid-1970s. But he eventually found his way back to technology through a gig at Lucasfilms Games in the 1980s. (This causes the first of many conversational geekouts on my part, as I immediately leap to the conclusion that he had worked on Rescue on Fractalus!, which turned out not to be the case.) He's also a novelist, and was lured to the Times from a position as the vice-president of new media at the Washington Post Company.

"In talking about the future," he says of his mission, "stories often do the best job of conveying concepts." Thus, several of his columns have taken the form of "alternative future histories," in which he limns scenarios where Julia Roberts stars in a film opposite her computer-generated younger self, or a newspaper editoiral argues that "in a truly multimedia environment of 2025, most Americans don't need to understand more than a hundred or so words at a time," requiring "a frank reassessment of where long-form literacy itself lies in the spectrum of skills that a modern nation requires of its workers." ("I have never gotten so much hate mail," he laughs, all from people who failed to pick up on the satirical aspect of the piece.)

Given the editorial focus at GalleyCat, I want to shift our focus from newspapers to book publishing, and we do talk about the potential impact of an affordable and aesthetically pleasing e-book reader, along with the possibilities to be tapped in e-ink and e-paper. But the big picture affecting all the media industries is too exciting for us not to keep circling back. "When the last baby boomer dies, paper is supposed to fall off a cliff. It's simply not true," Rogers argues. "The millennial generation will grow into reading the news, and paper will be a piece of that... And we'll still like to pay people who know what they're doing to package the news for us. The Daily Me never happened." That led to another conversational geekout, I'm afraid, in which I may have blurted something about 1997's infamous Wired "PUSH!" cover story, which predicted the death of the web browser.

That article is an important reminder that the hippest visions of our digital future won't necessarily be the ones that come to pass. "We have to keep in mind that a lot of people breaking new ground on the Internet are classic early adopters," Rogers cautions. "There's an old venture capital saying in Silicon Valley—your most important customer is the 10,001st, not the first." It would be unfair, though, to think of him as a pie-in-the-sky optimist. He recognizes that serious journalism has become "a real endangered species," particularly in the online world, and acknowledges that "there are good solutions but it's going to take a lot of work to make the business part of serious journalism successful." Ultimately, he proposes, in both the news and book publishing worlds, the ubiquity of electronic distribution and the trends towards audience participation and communication will converge even more closely than they already do.

If you want to learn more, Rogers will be one of six media practicioners and analysts taking part in a Columbia School of Journalism panel discussion tonight on "the changing media landscape" that will be simulcast live at Ground Report and archived for viewing later.