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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Anonymous commenters - please add a signature (doesn't have to be your real name) on each post of yours. Anne O'Namus, Norm D. Ploom, Angry from Kent, Demosthenes, or even your real initials, it doesn't matter.
Commenters are expected to be polite to each other, but the same standard doesn't apply to comments regarding me.
Australian commenters are very very strongly advised to publish anonymously. Sydney alone has more defamation actions than the entire USA and UK. Nearly double that of the UK in fact.
As Google does not reliably inform me that a comment has been posted, and I have no control over first publication, I assert that all comments are innocently disseminated under the NSW DEFAMATION ACT 2005 - SECT 32 and similar acts.