Shameless self promotion

I would be fail­ing in my duty of shame­less self pro­mo­tion if I didn’t draw your atten­tion to this nug­get from Jack Shafer in the Wash­ing­ton Post:

As Slate’s media critic, I begin most days by check­ing what my Brit­ish col­leagues are say­ing about journ­al­ism. Thanks to the time-zone dif­fer­ence, they’re sev­eral hours ahead of U.S. sites such as Rome­nesko in col­lect­ing news about the news busi­ness, and they do it from their own unique per­spect­ive. The Guard­ian’s indus­tri­ous Roy Greenslade does a great job of pack­ing the whole world of journ­al­ism into his blog.

The best Brit-crit is Adrian Monck whose new book, “Can You Trust the Media?,” writ­ten with Mike Han­ley, rips what they call the culture’s “trust obses­sion.” Beware the news­pa­pers, magazines, TV news oper­a­tions and other media insti­tu­tions that crave the audience’s trust, they coun­sel. It’s just a con they’re run­ning so they can sell your eye­balls to advert­isers. Like­wise, spurn those who pine for more “trust­worthy” media insti­tu­tions. Indi­vidual report­ers and colum­nists may be trust­worthy, but the only depend­able way to tame the public’s doubts is to give them access to the raw data from which journ­al­ism is pro­duced. (The book hasn’t been pub­lished in the United States yet, so try Amazon.co.uk.)