Four years ago, two young reporters - one fresh out of Michigan State, the other Harvard - uploaded a grainy video onto the Internet portraying an ominous future in which the traditional news media has been replaced by a sprawling, customized network of individualized, web-based news feeds. Robin Sloan and Matthew Thompson, a pair of Poynter Institute Naughton Fellows, called their brainchild the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, or EPIC.

In their 2004 video, Sloan and Thompson depicted EPIC as a product of "Googlezon," a company created after an imagined merger between Google and Amazon.com. The pair suggested that EPIC would upend the traditional media by using its "detailed knowledge of every user's social network, demographics, consumption habits and interests to provide total customization of content." In the process, Googlezon would revolutionize the traditional news business, while creating a new model of consumer news and entertainment consumption.

Four years after they produced their video, much of the mainstream media is retrenching, while Google and Yahoo are moving aggressively into online news distribution and independent bloggers like Arianna Huffington are grabbing the attention of news consumers.

Portfolio.com checked in with Thompson, now a 27-year-old web editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Sloan, 28, the new media strategist for San Francisco-based Current.tv, about what has - and hasn't - changed since they produced their video, and why they are both more optimistic about the future of the news business than EPIC might suggest.

Sloan and Thompson both agreed that they underestimated the power of user-generated content sites, like YouTube, and the popularity of social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

"In 2004, anyone could see that social networking was popular, or that Google was doing cool things with data," Thompson said. "But fewer people could see how all these developments fit together, and I think EPIC helped offer a bit of a jolt there. I think events have definitely borne out that synergy between all these trends."

The video's main argument is that the Internet has created a new global media architecture by which a "sprawling, chaotic 'mediascape' is filtered, ordered and delivered." Connected to multiple global social networks by ever-faster Internet service, the pair argued, individuals will soon be able to exchange information - read: news - upstream and downstream at the click of a button.

"Everyone contributes now," the video's narrator intones against a backdrop of slightly ominous house music, "from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations." But in exchange for this democratization of information, the mainstream news media "has ceased to exist."

Back in 2004, Sloan told me that he was not as gloomy about the future of the media as the video suggests.

"We used Google, Amazon, and [The New York Times] as archetypes to get a point across," Sloan said at the time. "We overstated things a little - 'the press as you know it has ceased to exist' - because it made for a better and more engaging story." By 2014, Sloan said, the mainstream media "will certainly still exist, but I think it is quite possible that its reputation and its role in our lives may be irrevocably altered by then."

EPIC represented the vision of two young journalists struggling to come to terms with technological advances that have created entirely new media: cable and satellite television, broadband and wireless Internet access. The rapid development of the Internet has radically increased the publicly accessible sources of information available to the news consumer. Today, anyone with a phone line, a cable box, or a Wi-Fi connection has access to an almost infinite number of sources from which to consume information.

The explosion of news and opinion websites has confronted consumers with a bewildering array of information sources. This phenomenon, the diffusion of media sources, is beginning to drastically alter not only the economics of the news media business, but also the very definition of journalism itself. In the years since Thompson and Sloan made the video, "the fragmentation of traditional media has only accelerated," Sloan told me recently.

Indeed, the Internet has radically diffused media power - democratizing public communication and enabling citizens to form new virtual relationships that would have previously been impossible.

And thanks to the 24-hour news cycle spawned by cable news, all-night AM talk-radio and the Internet, the traditional nightly print deadline is rapidly becoming obsolete. The new virtual deadlines are counted in minutes, not hours, and for the online news-writer, wire reporter or blogger, the credo all too often seems to be "shoot first, verify later." Journalists have always pushed deadlines, but against the constant drumbeat demand for the latest breaking news, the old daily deadlines seem fairly luxurious in the face of the 24-hour news cycle.

The mainstream news establishment has tried to adapt to the emergence of new media journalism by consolidating - a rational economic response to the increased competition in the media market. Major news organizations have joined forces - News Corp. and Dow Jones, Reuters and Thompson - hoping to cut costs and leverage global brands to drive advertising revenue. Thus, throughout the news media business, we see what the Project for Excellence in Journalism has called "conflicting movements toward fragmentation and convergence," a simultaneous dispersion of media sources and an attempt by the major media companies to consolidate control over them.

Thompson and Sloan intended EPIC to be a conversation-starter among journalists. As Sloan told me at the time, "We were trying to light a fire under some asses."

"Choice and control are just too cool, too useful, and too satisfying to resist," Sloan said. "Add distributed creation and collaborative filtering, and you can come up with systems that are so much more flexible and efficient than anything happening in a modern newsroom."

"But unlike most newsrooms, these processes don't come with values baked in," Sloan added. The goal is that they are "executed by people who are dedicated to the notion of fairness, integrity, and truth-telling. On an individual level -- especially insofar as we are bloggers and media-makers -- we can decide we want to adopt those values for ourselves."

Sam Gustin