Googling the Future

John Leo's column in the May 16th issue of the U.S. News & World Report is about the future history of the news media.

The year is 2014. the press as we know it no longer exists. Traditional reporting has collapsed. News is churned out by the media giant Googlezon. (Google has taken over many companies and joined forces with Amazon.) The news consists of blogs, attitudes, discoveries, preferences, claims, and random thoughts, gathered and shaped by computers and a few human editors, then fed back to ordinary people who produce the continuing conversation. The New York Times is off the Internet. It still publishes, but the newspaper has become a newsletter read only by the elite and the elderly.

This is the finding of a clever, eight-minute mock documentary, EPIC 2014, produced by the fictional Museum of Media History (in reality, journalists Matt Thompson of the Fresno Bee and Robin Sloan of Current, a new cable news channel in San Francisco). Thompson and Sloan recently added a short section taking the history up to 2015. The mockumentary is starting to reach a mass audience at a time of unusually high anxiety for the news industry. The news business has been hobbled by a string of scandals and credibility problems. Skirmishes between reporters and bloggers seem like the beginning of a long war between old media and new. Newspaper publishers are nervous--some would say paralyzed with fright--over polls showing that young adults are not reading papers. Their audience is dying off. A lot of young people say they get their news from a brief look at headline news or from late-night comedians.

The 8-minute Flash movie is worth a view. Check it out.