Whenever people ask me why I left television news (a world which — I have to say — I loved) to run a J-School, I never give the real answer.
Because the real answer is just the name of someone they (and you) probably won’t ever have heard of: Richard Wild.
Richard is gone now. He was shot dead in Baghdad in 2003. I wrote the letter that got him in to Iraq. Continue reading
Do people who say they read The Economist online really read The Economist online?
The paper’s Andreas Kluth has a great post that digs below the ‘what we say/what we do’ BS. (In the UK, ever wondered why so many people say they watch Channel 4 News but then don’t actually watch it?) Continue reading
Clay Shirky has many criticisms of newspapers, but was one of the industry’s biggest mistakes in the digital era rushing in inexperienced consultants who talked the talk but knew little about businesses and how to build them? As someone wrote in the New York Times in 2001:
In 1999 and 2000, I witnessed the arc of Internet investment frenzy and collapse firsthand while working as a consultant to a prominent British newspaper publisher, helping to create and spin off Internet start-ups based on the parent company’s newspapers.
Clay Shirky’s irritatingly trite post (you find it — Clay doesn’t believe in hyperlinking on his blog) deserves an equally irritating and trite response.
But in the spirit of pedantry, let’s just pick on one of his small but sweeping asides:
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.)
(God put his commandments on tablets of stone, Shirky hides them in parentheses.) Continue reading
The New Republic has of late played hosted to a debate on democracy and the news media. Hard-boiled readers of this blog will know that it doesn’t believe in the democratic nourishment provided by news content, but is more agnostic on the role played in democracy by media institutions.
Seconds out, in the newsprint-coloured trunks, Paul Starr steps in with Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption). Continue reading
Does Sky News want to run the World Service? Well, it does in Australia. According to the the Sydney Morning Herald:
A dispute has erupted between the ABC and the subscription television industry, triggered by a call by the pay TV channel Sky News for taxpayer-funded broadcasters to compete with the private sector for government money to set up new channels. Continue reading