Is 'Googlezon' in our future?

Like Charles Dickens's Ghost of Christmas future, two young journalists have been showing the news media a disturbing picture of a time that might be - a near future in which the press, as we know it, has become irrelevant.

While some say their dark prediction is highly improbable, others say that vision has already arrived.

An eight-minute video by Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan called "EPIC 2014" - a faux documentary that purports to look back from 2014 to tell how the mainstream media died - made waves at newspaper seminars and in journalism classrooms when it was released in early 2004. But when the pair released the video on the Internet - with no explanation as to who had created it or why - it made a worldwide impression.

"I love the mystery of it. I never would have done it any other way," says Mr. Thompson. Bloggers discussed who might be behind it and what message was intended.

"Judging by the number of times it was sent to me, there were a lot of eyeballs on that thing," says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif.

"We were really surprised by the intense reaction it received outside the journalism community," says Thompson, who's now deputy editor of interactive media at the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. While journalists often take the video as a dark jeremiad, nonjournalists often embrace it as a positive view of the media future, he says.

In the video, search-engine giant Google and online retailer Amazon join to create "Googlezon." ("It was too delicious a name to pass up," Thompson says.) They unleash EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which filters and delivers (as Thompson intones in his serious narration) "a custom content package for each user, using his choices, his consumption habits, his interests, his demographic, his social network." The information comes from blogs and citizen video cameras as well as conventional media sources. Googlezon's computers construct their own news stories by "stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them."

By 2010, when the "news wars" break out, the fight is between Googlezon and Microsoft. None of the "old media" is powerful enough to take part. The New York Times sues Googlezon, claiming that the company's fact-stripping robots violate copyright law when they pluck material from the Times, but it loses the case in the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Times concedes and drops off the Internet. It becomes a print-only publication for a small, elderly, elite audience.

"At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world - deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything ever available before," the video says. But at its worst, EPIC could encourage citizens to live in their own little worlds, getting information that is "narrow, shallow, and sensational."

Some say the forecasts, such as Google and Amazon merging, are far-fetched. Tech-savvy viewers often don't see the big fuss: For them, EPIC's media-scape is already here.

But Thompson and Mr. Sloan, who now works on the website of Current TV, a new media venture in San Francisco, didn't make EPIC 2014 expecting it to be an accurate predictor of the future.

"I think if you look at the really overarching themes, it holds up," says Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in St. Petersburg, Fla. Mr. Finberg encouraged Thompson and Sloan to make the video when they worked at Poynter in 2004. "It's a way of telling a story about some of the fundamental challenges facing the news industry," Finberg says. "It's a conversation starter, it's a provocateur, a poke.... Some of it is far-fetched, but, frankly, some of it isn't far-fetched."

Page: 1 | 2