Epic 2014

Today Dave Cohn, a.k.a. 'digidave,' a technology reporter and the creator of the entrepreneurial journalism website, spot.us, gave a presentation to my Specialized Journalism class at USC. At the end of his hopeful talk he left us with this rather dismal yet humorous short film about what is going on with media right now and where we could be heading. The film, EPIC 2014, is a Flash movie released in November 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. It is based on a presentation they gave at the Poynter Institute in the spring of that year. The movie is presented from the viewpoint of a fictional "Museum of Media History" in the year 2014. It explores the effects that the convergence of popular News aggregators, such as Google News, with other Web 2.0 technologies like blogging, social networking and user participation may have on journalism and society at large in a hypothesized future. The film popularized the term Googlezon and touches on major privacy and copyright issues raised in this scenario.It is 8 minutes long.

The Greatest Things there are to Hear

This is for all your radio junkies worried about the future of NPR and public radio. Check out this wonderfully written piece from The Telegraph, sent to me by USC professor Sandy Tolan. It's called, 'Why we're still ga-ga for radio."

A Newspaper? On a PC? That's Crazy Talk

I discovered this lovely bit of media history in Sam Grobart's New York Times technology blog.

He writes ... "Since it’s the weekend, here’s something just for kicks that’s been making the rounds: In 1981, San Francisco TV station KRON aired a news segment about how a select group of computer users were getting their daily copy of the San Francisco Examiner not on paper, but on their home computer (!). The best part comes about one minute into the clip, when one of the Examiner’s editors explains that the paper is “not in this to make money.”