Excerpt from State of the News Media 2005
By the Project for Excellence in Journalism
In December 2004, a mock documentary about the future of news began making the rounds of the nation’s journalists and Web professionals.
The video, produced by two aspiring newsmen fresh from college, envisioned a nightmare scenario – by the year 2014, technology would effectively destroy traditional journalism.
In 2008, Google, the search engine company, would merge with Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, and in 2010 the new “Googlezon” would create a system edited entirely by computers that would strip individual facts and sentences from all content sources to create stories tailored to the tastes of each person.
A year later, The New York Times would sue Googlezon for copyright infringement and lose before the Supreme Court.
Will the New York Times be around in 2011? If they are not around, who will protect us from Googlezon? And who were these two “visionaries”? I demand answers.
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