Newspapers that allow themselves to be seduced away from the bedrock of good journalism do so at their peril. The "fridge door" journalism of lifestyle inserts that confuse entertainment with news will find it difficult to compete with the endless stream of similar material available elsewhere.So far, so good.
There is a popular view that news-gathering will be taken out of the hands of journalists and taken over by networks of internet bloggers or computers using complex programs to compile information from the internet. Under Googlezon, a scenario put forward by internet company Google, newspapers will cease to exist on March 9, 2014, as a result. While on-line communities and technologies may produce an impossibly vast bank of information, it will mostly lack credibility and therefore authority, and it will overwehlmingly not be news. It ignores the crucial point put forward by Philip Meyer in his book Vanishing Point, which gives newspapers a bit longer than Google – until the first quarter of 2043.One problem: Googlezon is a Fictional Company that appears in the film Epic 2014. It is no more "put forward by internet company Google" than Greenpeace was responsible for writing "Moby Dick". It is Entertainment, and shouldn't be confused with News or Opinion.
This was first brought to my attention in a comment on Tim Blair's blog.
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