And a third caveat: Lot's of other things will happen, too, most of which will be variations on the same old same old.

3/ The media (defined broadly and including both news and entertainment, real editorial and advertorial, and paid advertising, via radio, television, newspapers, magazines, billboards, direct mail, and the web, plus more) will continue to converge, but not in a way that helps professional communicators.

2/ Squandering -- Excellent to adequate communications will fail to be taken out-of-the-room. i.e. communications initiatives will be squandered by the lack of follow-up by PR departments. A speech won't be distributed to the media; customers will not receive copies of great ads, employees won't be told about company triumphs, cop[ies of presetations won't be sent to trade magazine editors…

4/ Internationalism and globalization will be even more of a communications problem in 2002 as Americans become even more self-centered and insular, and non-Americans raise even more eye-brows at the American ways of conducting business (and more). September 11 will continue to cause major problems -- most unrecognized and therefore not tackled and beaten -- for business communicators. American hypocrisy, in the view of non-Americans, will be a big deal. Americans, though, won't even notice it.

In mergers, the resulting department may be something like 125 - 150% of the total of the previous two operations. But while the pros are cut back, the size of the customer base, the number of employees to be informed and inspired, the number of suppliers and other stakeholders, the number of products to be promoted, the number of countries being served, and the investment community audience will all be greater. The result is more work for fewer people, causing reduced effectiveness. Sometimes the 125 - 150 percent figure is high, as we learn from a Wall Street Journal story about IABC's current chairman, John Clemons. Hal Lancaster wrote, "When Ameritech merged with Southwestern Bell, only four of the 100 Ameritech marketing and communications staffers kept their jobs; Mr. Clemons, now with Nextel, was one of them." 96 percent of the communicators were axed; how many stakeholders disappeared at the same time?

Mergers or not, executives driven by quarterly results linked to bonus programs and stock options will fire senior communicators to save on salaries. And they'll split up communications departments, putting the pros into Marketing and Human Resources and Finance, and giving them bosses who are unskilled in our craft and unable to recognize good ideas, and therefore won't approve them.

2/ Technology will grow as a sucker-up of budgets, while putting ignorant and unqualified computer technicians and technocrats into increasing control over content that should be the responsibility of professional communicators. The increased technology will bring little or no benefit -- the money should have been spent on useful communications -- and the role of MIS will be more harmful than ever, rather than simply being neutral.

IABC's failed venture into Talking Business Now doesn't mean other communicators have learned from this debacle not to blow fortunes on bad web sites. Excessive MIS budgets will be spent imposing unneeded and expensive flat screen monitors on us and upgrading perfectly adequate computers but we won't be allowed to buy Quark xPress, Photoshop or an iMac so we can communicate with our graphic houses, and Blackberry is out of the question at most companies.

Web sites will be designed so communicators can't update them themselves and will have to wait hours, days or weeks for MIS people to do these simple tasks. Sites will continue to be out of date and fail to communicate what's new. Sure, some places will get the updates on schedule, but most won't.

Even when the news is posted, our most important and topical messages will be buried three or four links deep. Just look at www.IABC.com and try to figure out what's new. You can't, without clicking and clicking. Now think of a daily paper where the front page was blank or just a bunch of ads, and you had to use scissors to get inside.

Clerks and secretaries -- whoops, sorry, Executive Assistants -- and vice-presidents, all with no graphic skills, will continue to make Powerpoint slides you can't read from the third row in the audience.

Not only will the slides stink, but the oral presentation will be just about as bad.

The driving force behind the reaction of most people to most e-mail will simply be to get rid of it, yet we'll continue to have bosses and clients who kill existing or refuse to approve new print programs so that people can read comfortably, at their leisure.

Video conferences will be mismanaged, dull, agendaless, and lack minutes with action items. They'll last too long. A few communicators will get their heads around digital cameras and/or scanners, (see the Media section below) but most digital photo equipment will be used by non-photographers, resulting in even more lousy pictures on even more web sites.

(In the version of this I sent to Charles, I wrote "Check out IABC chapter sites for party pictures of the backs of people, award winner shots too dark to see, and worse." I continue to be astounded at the number of really lousy amateur snapshots that get published, but it won't get better, because PR people will continue to usually use photos badly, if at all, even though technology makes it easy to get good pictures, and distribute them.

3/ The media (defined broadly and including both news and entertainment, real editorial and advertorial, and paid advertising, via radio, television, newspapers, magazines, billboards, direct mail, and the web, plus more) will continue to converge, but not in a way that helps professional communicators.

Print reporters, instead of writing more stories about more topics, will be reworking a few stories for a web site and a company's tv or radio stations. Takeovers mean fewer editors to pitch, and fewer opportunities to at least get one or two editors to play our stories. The skills of print and tv journalists will be badly applied to each other's medium.

Media "business" interests will control more and more editorial content and "converged" media companies will use their various properties to promote each other, blocking opportunities for us to get media coverage. The other night Larry King's show was devoted not to news and public affairs, but to promoting a weirdo show (Ripley's Believe It or Not) on another Turner -- CNN - AOL Time Warner channel. Not bad, I guess, if you are the Ripley PR person, but Larry must be embarrassed.

Audiences will become even more cynical and lacking in trust of the media. Larry had a big show about Black Hawk Down; did he think it was news or was this a Warner Brothers movie he was promoting on CNN, an AOL Time Warner property?

And the money devoted by businesses buying other companies to implement convergence means less money for local editorial coverage. Local media, instead of attending our press conferences and having reporters do stories about our clients, will just rip copy off the wire services to save money.

Once the networks get a crew somewhere expensive, we can rest assured it will keep that crew there longer than needed, just to amortize the transportation costs.

But this could be an opportunity for us -- our news releases and supplied video footage is free to the stations, so maybe they'll run this instead of paying a reporter to actually do a real story.

PR people will continue to fail to provide good photos, either still or moving, to the media. In my note to Charles, I wrote "…except for IABC members who read the good Photo Trends story on the Tucson web site, or learned about Photo Trends at the Houston IABC district conference." IABC's magazine, Communications World, has fetured an OK (as contrasted to good or awful) feature on photography for as long as I can remember, but its web site shows no interest in this at all.

Making things worse, reduced advertising means reduced news holes means less space for stories we originate about our clients.

While we as communicators should be promoting depth of management, (for many reasons) and we should be building the reputation of communicators by speaking on high-level topics ourselves, reporters will continue to look not for the discipline-specific executives with expertise in the topic but instead demand a "Star" CEO who only has a vague idea of the specific situation.

And for those of us without stars, we can rest assured the space / time for our good and important stores will be filled with yet more stories about Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch and Lou Gerstner and Carly and the Xerox woman, and even Jack, regardless of his retirement. It will be interesting to see how long Bob Lutz stays in the spotlight at General Motors, before the CEO moves in front of him.

Regardless, star-power stories that are almost gossip will overpower useful inforamtion from the next level or management, just as happened in 2001 and 2000.

2/ Excellent to adequate communications will fail to be taken out-of-the-room. i.e. communications initiatives will be squandered by the lack of follow-up by PR departments. A speech won't be distributed to the media; customers will not receive copies of great ads, employees won't be told about company triumphs, …

In the notes for Charles, I mention I predicted that members of the chapters he was visitinging who were not at his presentations wouldn't get any information about the most important things they missed in Charles' presentation. And I predicted the chapter web sites wouldn't post the list of my predictions for others to see and think about.

Regular BAK's Report readers know I've been complaining that in our own industry, PRSA headquarters was too lazy and/or badly managed to even provide a link to an available web rebroadcast of a pretty good speech by its elected leader, although you could find the link, if you knew about the speech, at PRSA Detroit's site.

Don't even bother looking for an IABC speech to our bosses, employers, or clients from anyone, anytime, on the main "International" IABC web site. And you'll have a heard time finding any IABC chapter that thinks enough of its members to provide those who missed a lunch or seminar with any important content from the event afterwards. One exception that proves the rule is IABC Tucson, which does have the highlights of a James Lukaszewski web presentation posted, for all Tucson members (and other web surfers) who missed it. Congratulations.

And it's just as bad in business; those few companies that do post an executive's speech bury it somewhere unnoticeable anyway. Go look at your own organizations' sites.

It won't get any better in 2002.

George Bush hired an ad woman, Charlotte Beers, not a PR man or woman, to communicate "diplomacy" internationally.

I asked Charles to ask his audience members to conduct a little survey among their table mates at lunch. Are you, the communicator, changing the words in some contract? No? Are lawyers changing the words in your release? Yes? Are you in the highest level meetings at your organization? No? Are the lawyers and the accountants? Yes? Get my point?

And I asked Chaarles to ask them to make a list of all the times they've seen IABC / PRSA leadership taking the "you'll benefit from putting communicators at the management table" message outside its own meetings, to Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce and other groups of senior executives that are your clients and employers. Could they even write down one example? Is the business editor of their local daily paper at Charles' seminar to hear, and report on, the insights and ideas of the immediate past top elected officer of the biggest international organization of professional communicators? Has Charles been interviewed by news folks from the local television stations?

And if I was allowed a number 4:

4/ Internationalism and globalization will be even more of a communications problem in 2002 as Americans become even more self-focused and insular, and non-Americans raise even more eye-brows at the American ways of conducting business (and more). September 11 will continue to cause major problems -- most unrecognized and therefore not tackled and beaten -- for business communicators.

The DaimlerChrysler merger, the failed General Electric Honeywell deal, the about to fail Hewlett - Packard and Compaq deal, the failure of the North American car companies to penetrate the European markets, the drop in international travel that is hitting hotels and resorts, the international spread of layoffs caused by "caution" expressed by Americans, and more will be replicated in various negative forms in 2002.

Because we understand the importance of communications, we will try to counter declines in travel by increases in video conferences, but we'll know we are losing the opportunities to actually see foreign lands and get to know, over lunch or a beer after a meeting, the people with whom we are doing business. The accountants who control travel budgets will make our work as communicators even harder by keeping us, and those we serve, stuck in our cubicles. I asked if the people Charles spoke to in Arizona would have sat in a cubicle staring at a monitor for half an hour while Charles spoke to them via the internet?

Web sites are a great way to see if anyone has caught on that the first two Ws in WWW stand for World Wide. Here's a quick test. Go to half a dozen sites of major organizations with which you do business and which operate in at least six countries, and see just how hard it is to find out what's going on in England, Australia, Canada, India and other English speaking countries, let alone places with a "foreign" language.

Now imagine you are a customer, supplier, or shareholder in those places, and the someone in the "home" country wants you to go out of your way for them.

I checked some sites I thought had an Arizona/Kilgore connection. Starwood hotels (the Phoenician; I would have liked to have stayed there) seems to have no links to a site in languages other than English. Resistol (I'd like a cowboy hat) is just a mini-site, and hopeless. Staples says on its opening page that the site is just intended for U.S. residents, but it does actually have some international store information. Viking Range has minimal non-US content. (I once had a great steak in Phoenix, so a range is a logical Arizona item.) Kodak is exceptionally good internationally (I was in Arizona taking pictures on Kodak film) and Ford is not bad internationally (I stood in the back of a Ford pickup at AJ's Fine Foods in Scottsdale to take a shot of a woman with a bag of groceries)

All in all, I don't see much changing. There will be no break-through like e-mail and the internet were a few years ago. Advanced software is not going to make our lives easier in 2002, assuming we were allowed to get it. The media are not going to expand programs and publications to tell our stores. Bosses are not suddenly going to "get it" in regard to what we do. We won't see budgets grow, and we can expect, in fact, budget cuts and increased firings of us or our communications colleagues.