The Metajournalist

What I'm reading at the moment

All those pieces about the death of newspapers and what to do about it...

Which means Paul Starr's 'Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)' in the New Republic, which seems the most comprehensive analysis of the problems facing the press in the US... and perhaps is the thing that triggered a lot of the other pieces.

There are a couple of more upbeat takes - Yochai Benkler's direct response to Starr in a letter to the New Republic and Steven Johnson's 'Old Growth Forest and the Future of News', a speech he gave at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas.

I found out about the Paul Starr piece via a tweet from Clay Shirky. I imagine he was contacted by lots of journalists writing pieces provoked by Starr's analysis - and got kind of fed up so put up his ideas about the newspaper industry's lack of a future on a blog - in 'Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable' and various other pieces on iTunes and why it won't work for news and micropayments (and why they won't work).

There's lots of other stuff too - lots of opinion pieces and punditry in the UK press, all of which seemed to come after the Starr piece. Of course, the newspaper business is very different here but still faces obvious problems... It might help to think a bit about how it's different and whether the gloom or glee you find in US pieces is helpful when it comes to understanding what's happening to the UK press.

The UK pieces are too numerous and too small to link to, really, though Stephen Moss's piece in The Guardian on the death of the local paper in the UK is an interesting read...

What else... I did look at 'The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers' by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney in The Nation - it's more manifesto than analysis... but interesting all the same...

So I want to think a bit about it all and how it affects how we teach journalism and what journaism courses and universities should be doing to help...

And I also want to think a bit about this discussion as one strand of metajournalism, which I probably need to explain a bit at some point.

Getting started again

This is a new attempt to get a research blog going... I'm hoping that this time round I can keep up the momentum here. I've been reading people who seem to know how to do it and trying to work out how to follow their advice/example.

Cory Doctorow may be altogether the wrong example. Perhaps I should aim more for Tom Slee - though I have a feeling that I may fall a long way short and prove a lot slower - though not in a good way.

If I can get going, I'm hoping to pull together some ideas about journalism, in particular journalism about journalism, into enough of a shape that I can write something longer and more coherent about it...

But I'm not promising anything.