The intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fic­a­tion for journ­al­ism has never been kicked around with much con­vic­tion. James W. Carey gave it a shot in the mid-1990s, more in sor­row than in anger.

He was strug­gling to make sense of the twis­ted leg­acy of journ­al­ism within the Amer­ican uni­ver­sity sys­tem, but in passing he let slip the real pur­pose of learn­ing journ­al­ism in the 20C — to under­stand, doc­u­ment and cel­eb­rate the Great Amer­ican City. Con­tinue read­ing →

Chan­nel 4 News, the UK TV news industry’s favour­ite TV news pro­gramme, provides an excel­lent example of the prob­lems of single plat­form media trans­lat­ing to the web.

They have let­ters which seem to back up claims that the US State Depart­ment did warn of ser­i­ous reper­cus­sions to US/UK intel­li­gence shar­ing. Great catch. How does it look online?

Now ask your­self about the future of news pro­vi­sion on Brit­ish tele­vi­sion. The truth is it can’t sur­vive to do this kind of thing prop­erly without a much more rad­ical rethink about plat­forms, alli­ances and own­er­ship. And yet this is nowhere men­tioned in any debate on pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing. Think about it.