The Future of News

This is the latest despatch from Loose Wire Service, a sister service to this blog that provides newspapers and other print publications with a weekly column by yours truly. Rates are reasonable: Email me if you’re interested. Jeremy Wagstaff discusses how the Internet has redefined journalism and the emergence of “hyperlocal” news The Jakarta Post … Read more

Journalists Should Bite the Bullet

  screenshot from CNN’s website It’s the one area where old-style journalism hasn’t really made the strides it could. I can understand why: Journalism is a very, very conservative profession. But The Journalism Iconoclast, written by Patrick Thornton, makes a telling point when he points to a nice new feature of CNN.com’s website — the … Read more

News: Demise by Increment?

Is the problem with journalism that it always focuses on the increment? Was reading Jeff Jarvis’ piece on the revolutionary impact of the iPhone — not, I hasten to add, about the iPhone as an item (the fetishism surrounding it may mark a lowpoint in our materialistic age) but about the citizen journalism coverage of the absurd lines forming outside shops by … Read more

Does It Matter Where News Comes From?

Thoughtprovoking stuff from John Lloyd of Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, who thinks news is a universal thing, like human rights. I know I do stuff for the BBC World Service but I’m with Daya Thussu on this: news reflects the values of the people who report it. They may be … Read more

The Death of DRM, the Rise of Patrons

Forget being a big old mass music consumer. Become a Patron of the Arts. The IHT’s Victoria Shannon chronicles the last few gasps of life in Digital Rights Management (DRM) for music, saying that “With the falloff in CD sales persisting and even digital revenue growth now faltering in the face of rampant music sharing … Read more