the future of the news given in 2003 by Martin A. Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, given to the Software and Information Industry Association. Sloan showed the transcript to Thompson, which, after much discussion and brainstorming, led to, "a very different interpretation of what Nisenholtz was talking about." After some back and forth discussion while on a trip to Miami, Florida, Sloan and Thompson pondered Nisenholtz's original point when he mentioned the game Ultima Online and put it into the context of journalism. They soon agreed that it is the most advanced example of a medium people create by merely participating in it. The game, Ultima Online, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. As people play, they add to all the other players' experiences of the game, altering the whole fabric of the medium through their interactions with it. They wondered, "what if you could apply that model to journalism?" What if individuals could create and affect news stories simply by reading, viewing, and/or listening to them? After their trip to Miami, Sloan and Thompson began assembling their ideas. They organized a powerpoint project, titled, The Miami Project, and began a series of presentations in their local offices at the Poynter Institute. Their colleagues were interested yet unenthusiastic about the project. In the spring of 2004, while preparing for an annual Online Leaders seminar at the Institute, they were asked to present it again. This time, they decided to present the story from the perspective of the future, as if it had already happened. They assembled the first version of the film late one night in Poynter's visual journalism lab, on an iMac G4 running Final Cut Pro. The narrative was met with enthusiasm by the conference participants, and they soon began revising and polishing their presentation, this time using Macromedia Flash. They kept presenting it, introducing the film dramatically – gliding into rooms wearing tin foil hats. They always followed the movie with the question: "If this is what the year 2014 looks like, what are you going to do today to make sure your news organization doesn't get sidelined? How do you make sure you can play in this environment?" As the summer passed on, they thought of future plans for EPIC 2014, including a possible website with an interactive timeline and blog. Though these never materialized, and Sloan and Thompson eventually moved on to