The future of news where the facts come to reflect the animated fiction and more. If you checked out EPIC 2014" you saw an amusing sci-fi short that where "Googlezon" vs. "Microfriendster" battled for the eyeballs of the news reading public, and the NY Times became an elegant paper-only product for old people and collectors. This piece from Poynter begins to sound like that, with Google and Yahoo and Microsoft going for customized news and even a single device to bring you your news and feeds (could that be iPod, especially with iPodder to turn any written stuff into audio for those long commutes, and to get around the small screen issue?) The career picture I paint for my students puts them out in the world with the skills to be an independent news producer who can work within a legacy media company, but is just as comfortable selling news packages via iPodder, doing their best work in interactive narrative packages, and being able to write for any media. I do think they need to specialize in a storytelling form, like long form, or broadcast style, or text-based with good links, but they need the production skills to get the news out to a Googlebot or Yahoo so they can make a living. Who will pay? Think "micropayments" which have finally matured since the 1990s, and see a world where each news story brings its creator, pro or amateur, a check based on reputation rankings or other quality index,for example. You can check out Peppercoinfor an example of a micropayment mechanism that's got lots of buzz, and the article below for the business underpinnings regarding the rise of news aggregators vs. legacy newspaper companies. Poynter Online - Forecast 2005: For Newspapers, Competition Too Big to Ignore