I have the best friends. As you may know from ‘s blog, Bill and Laura just returned from France. Bill details the acquisition of the artwork below in this entry.

The landing page goes like this:

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline.
The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned.
What happened to the news?
And what is EPIC?

What follows is a seemingly interminable, self-promoting flash movie by Robin Sloan (“formerly of the Poynter Institute”), about the ascendance of new media. The gist of the clip is that, in the future, we’ll all be news producers. (Warning: Watch the movie at your own risk—you’ll never get those eight minutes of your life back.)

What a load of portentous horseshit.

I wouldn’t want to read media “created by everyone” for the same reason I wouldn’t want to live in a house “built by everyone.” There are tasks that require a certain level of skill to be useful: writing, reporting, investigating and storytelling among them (not to mention bricklaying and electrical contracting). Even assuming bloggers have access to newsmakers and newsworthy events, they would still have to deploy a raft of skills that “old media” journalists take years to learn.

As it is I think blogs are SO over—nothing’s cheaper than the average Joe’s opinion. My bet is that the narcissistic twenty-somethings who think blogging is legitimate journalism will tire of content-free gasbaggery as they reach their thirties and forties. I don’t know what the mediascape will look like in 2014, but you can be sure that it will still sit atop a foundation of actual reporters from whom the contemporary Drudges and Wonkettes will lift their facts.

(And yes, “Ooooh! Irony! He’s trashing blogs in a blog!!!” Yeah, yeah, I got it.)