Matthew Ricketson writing in The Age:
"Tension is rising in the news business as predictions about its future oscillate wildly between imminent implosion, an urgent need to overhaul the business model and belief that we are entering a new golden age.
Fighting your way through the thickets of data, claims and counter-claims, not to mention fear and loathing, is fraught because predicting the future is always tricky and because the media's ability to report dispassionately on the prospect of its own demise is especially tricky.
It should concentrate the mind wonderfully, though, as Dr Johnson once noted. Taking the scenarios one by one, then. First, if you believe the American journalism academic Philip Meyer, newspapers are dying.
Four years ago, Meyer predicted in his book, The Vanishing Newspaper, that newspapers would run out of readers in 2043 — the last quarter to be precise.
When Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, recently addressed the Future of Journalism summit in Sydney by satellite link, he had brought forward the newspaper doomsday clock but refused to be so specific this time."
Meanwhile over at AlterNet:
"So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq", by Greg Mitchell, a collection of essays that date back from the lead-up to the Iraq war, in 2003, through this fall, is a compelling antidote to the cult of misinformation written by the editor of Editor & Publisher, a journal of the newspaper industry, and one of the oldest magazines in the country. The book features a preface by Bruce Springsteen, and foreword by Joseph L. Galloway.
As one who has been on the cutting edge of exposing the Bush administration's pre-emptive war on the media, Mitchell, the author of nine other nonfiction works, is among the first to broach, and critically analyze, the issue of "non-hostile combat deaths," as well as suggest the long term costs of this war not merely to our veterans, but to our national ethos."
Read a Q & A with Mitchell here.
"Tension is rising in the news business as predictions about its future oscillate wildly between imminent implosion, an urgent need to overhaul the business model and belief that we are entering a new golden age.
Fighting your way through the thickets of data, claims and counter-claims, not to mention fear and loathing, is fraught because predicting the future is always tricky and because the media's ability to report dispassionately on the prospect of its own demise is especially tricky.
It should concentrate the mind wonderfully, though, as Dr Johnson once noted. Taking the scenarios one by one, then. First, if you believe the American journalism academic Philip Meyer, newspapers are dying.
Four years ago, Meyer predicted in his book, The Vanishing Newspaper, that newspapers would run out of readers in 2043 — the last quarter to be precise.
When Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, recently addressed the Future of Journalism summit in Sydney by satellite link, he had brought forward the newspaper doomsday clock but refused to be so specific this time."
Meanwhile over at AlterNet:
"So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq", by Greg Mitchell, a collection of essays that date back from the lead-up to the Iraq war, in 2003, through this fall, is a compelling antidote to the cult of misinformation written by the editor of Editor & Publisher, a journal of the newspaper industry, and one of the oldest magazines in the country. The book features a preface by Bruce Springsteen, and foreword by Joseph L. Galloway.
As one who has been on the cutting edge of exposing the Bush administration's pre-emptive war on the media, Mitchell, the author of nine other nonfiction works, is among the first to broach, and critically analyze, the issue of "non-hostile combat deaths," as well as suggest the long term costs of this war not merely to our veterans, but to our national ethos."
Read a Q & A with Mitchell here.
Comments