When talking about what ads appeal to us in our Intro to Digital Communications class on Tuesday night, the one thing that I saw in common is that we all now expect something back from advertisers for our time in viewing/interacting with ads.

Whether it’s a quiz, free song, or just the ability to click through the ad, we all are attracted to ads that give us a benefit, however simple or small.

The days of the static ads in newspapers and magazines, or even multi-media ads on television, are gone. We don’t want to sit back and have the ad delivered to us. We want to participate.

The smart, young future ad exec will realize this and target an audience who is accustomed to interacting with media: swiping, touching, clicking, responding. That’s our culture today, that’s how we consume media. We interact with it.

By creating ads that are interactive, that mimic what we’re doing in our everyday lives, advertisers are appealing to our new comfort zones. They are delivering ads that grab our decreasing attention spans and hold on to them for a bit, giving us a reward and hoping we’ll see their message in the process.

Ads have become part of the convergence, bringing their message to the digital realm and delivering a sensory experience to multiple platforms.

I rambled on a bit in our Intro to Digital Communications class about the past, but maybe ignored the future.

The future for journalists is bright, no matter the state of printed papers, magazines and all the other media impacted by the internet and digital media over the past couple decades.

During my ongoing ramble, I mentioned the competition from other newspapers, websites and blogs over the past 15 years, and some mistakes we made in trying to comply with the urgency of the internet. What I didn’t say — and I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging — is that we learned to do the task at hand well and watched several sites go out of business or stop trying because they couldn’t compete with us.

Why? Because we’re good at what we do. We know how to tell stories. We know how to be watchdogs. We know how to be fair. We know how to uncover the truth. We know how to make good pictures. We know how to cover the news. We’ve been doing it for 125 years, and we don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

The startup sites challenging us couldn’t do any of that well. They may have been able to get a story up quickly, but when people wanted to know what the real story was — what all the angles were and what it meant for them, they turned to us. Because we’re good at what we do, and take that very seriously.

Good news — good reporting — will never go out of style. Integrity and dependability will never go out of style. Good storytelling will never go out of style. Good reporters will never go out of style.

I’ve watched many ‘revolutions’ in the media business — digital instead of film photography, color on front pages, digital pagination, to name a few — since I was a cub reporter oh so many years ago, thrown out into the world with nothing more than a pencil, a pad and an old film Nikon, and they’ve all made us better reporters, better news-gatherers, better storytellers. Convergence and the Internet have done the same.

I see young reporters come into the business and they’re sharper than I ever was at their age, they have huge toolboxes and great skills. We add to those by teaching them about ethics, fairness, good reporting practices and by imparting our collective years of experience. And they teach us about the latest phone apps and social media platforms.

I’m hopeful about the future of journalism, which at its core will remain true, in whatever medium it’s displayed. There will always be a need for it, reporters willing to fill that need, and readers waiting (not as long as they used to) to consume it.

Even though I took a nonchalant position in a personalization versus privacy video debate in this week’s Introduction to Digital Communications class, our class discussion did prompt some concerns.

While I overall still feel that the advantages of big data collection and utilization far outweigh privacy and other concerns, the digital explosion and growth of big data applications still need to be kept in check — like everything else in life, I guess.

Part of our discussion had to do with health care, and the growing trend of centralizing health care and fitness records. Perhaps someday, they will all be kept on the cloud somewhere, accessible to any health care provider treating an individual.

The benefits of that would be innumerable. No longer would the left hand not know what the right hand was doing when it came to treatment, prescriptions, insurance, etc. It could eliminate confusion and guarantee that all of one’s health care providers were on the same page.

But at the same time, it could pose a very real threat to some people. A group of employees of a company I’m familiar with were all asked to fill out an annual health survey if they participated in the company’s group health insurance, as a way to show, over time, that some healthy initiatives were having a positive effect and potentially reduce the company’s rates.

While the employer promised that the results of the survey would remain anonymous and not effect health coverage, many employees were concerned. What if the health insurance provider somehow broke the confidence of the employees and provided the employer with confidential information detailing certain health risks — smoking, overeating, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc., and the employer decided to fire those employees to save on rates?

As a former smoker and someone who sees a physician regularly, it’s a daunting scenario. But does the risk outweigh the advantages of all my medical providers being able to share information and come up with the best health care plan for me collaboratively? I think not, but I’m going to be careful nonetheless.

It comes back to caution and personal responsibility. As a society, we need to be diligent about protecting privacy and rights as much as possible and ensure that there are penalties in place for those who would abuse our rights. There will always be abuses, but awareness and scrutiny will help keep those in check.

Gotta go, Amazon is telling me it’s time to spend some money.