Since late November of 2004, I've linked several times to a multimedia Flash presentation on the future of journalism. Among many other predictions, it forecasted that the New York Times would go offline in 2014, focusing their efforts on placting their sclerotic elite and elderly core readers who prefer their news on dead tree. Needless to say, the Gray Lady, beginning with her TimesSelect program, is doing its damndest to make that prediction come true--as I noted in September.

La Shawn Barber posts that the News From 2014 has been pushed back a year to 2015, and updated to reflect last year's technological developments. She also links to this Onion satire which came all-too-true last week:

Google Announces Plan To Destroy
All Information It Can't Index

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."

Update: Speaking of the present and future of journalism, they intersected today. Retired Army man Bill Roggio, who in November of 2005 embedded as a journalist with the Marines in western Iraq, appeared on CNN to try to explain the shortcomings of their war coverage--a big part of which are structural:

I found it very interesting that a large majority of the CNN audience did not "have confidence" in the news they were receiving from Iraq. It would have been interesting to have explored the reasons for this further. After watching the interview again, it was obvious Barbara Starr and I were talking about two entirely different subjects. Ms. Starr was discussing the administration and "strategic communications, information operations, spin, spin, spin," as well as the difficulties reporters encounter in Iraq. I was discussing how the media has failed to provide the proper context for the war, specifically in military operations, and how their reporting plays into the hands of al-Qaeda. There was plenty I wanted to discuss about the media & war reporting, but this was TV, I knew I'd only get a few minutes and had to focus on what I perceive to be a major weakness in the war reporting. This is in itself a major problem with the media's reporting on the war - particularly in television, where time is at a premium and complex issues are reduced to sound bytes.