Metaverse Applications and their Relationship with the Future of the Digital Journalism Industry:

The present study aims to monitor, analyze and interpret the visions expressed by a sample of digital media experts towards the future of the digital Journalism industry in the light of the announcement to use metaverse technologies, alongside the impacts that these applications may have on digital journalism in terms of: the medium nature, message form, the characteristics of the media personnel, the target audience and the changes that the digital Journalism environment may undergo as a result of using these technologies. All this will be applied within a framework of foresight approach by suing a sample of professional and academic experts and using “Delphi method” and Morphological Analysis to identify the expected future scenarios (optimistic, pessimistic, Stability) that through a foresight examination over the next two decades from 2022 to 2042.
The study found that the experts of the study stress that journalism, both paper and digital, faces significant challenges in light of recent technical developments, including metaverse. The Study found that the Egyptian Journalism institutions are not expected to join metaverse in the near future, and that metaverse would be a potential alternative to journalism in the future ، and the future of current journalists will be threatened in the age of metaverse, and that journalists should keep up with these developments and newspapers have to provide them with the necessary training and encourage them to do so.
The study concludes that the most prominent challenges facing Journalism institutions to join metaverse are the financial challenges, followed by technological challenges, then administrative challenges, then the lack of trained cadres, lack of awareness of the importance of involvement in metaverse, in addition to the ambiguity surrounding metaverse applications till this moment.