AlanMcGuinness's blog

The media is undergoing a revolution in which people will no longer look to newspapers for news, according to Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow.

Delivering the third Bob Friend Memorial Lecture at the University of Kent on Friday night, Snow said events in the Middle East demonstrate the benefits of social media websites but also that newspapers are becoming dated very quickly. Leaders in Tunisia and Egypt have been forced from power after mass protests driven by services like Twitter and Facebook.

Snow said: "I don't think people will look to newspapers for news. I don't think people are patient enough to read news in that way."

Before his lecture, titled ‘From film to Twitter – the media revolution: is the golden age of journalism come or gone?’, Snow presented this year’s winner of the Bob Friend Memorial Scholarship, Tania Steere, with her award.

Labour cannot sit back and wait for the Coalition to ‘screw up’ and must reconnect with the ‘hopes and aspirations’ of the British people.

That is the message party leader Ed Miliband delivered at Labour’s National Policy Forum in Gillingham, Kent.

The Centre for Journalism Newswire is now live. The project is being undertaken as part of the Centre's Online news day for third-year undergraduates.

In 'The Brown Years', the Independent's Steve Richards looks back on Gordon Brown's three years in Downing Street - focusing on the major events of his premiership.

The first episode, which was on Radio Four this morning, details his first few months in office, and how his initial honeymoon ended in such a brutal fashion.

That's the verdict of the Guardian's Hadley Freeman on Daybreak, ITV1's new breakfast programme.

What a strange thing Daybreak is looking set to be," she writes.

Victims of the BP oil spill should be prepared to wait years, perhaps even decades, for compensation.

That is one of the lessons that Ecuadorian residents say can be learned from their 17-year battle to hold the oil company Texaco to account for what has been called the 'Amazon's Chernobyl'.

 In a lengthy but brilliant article, Jeffrey Goldberg explores the possibility of Israel launching a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Among the 40 or so Israeli, Arab and American officials he speaks to, a consensus emerges that there is 50 per cent chance that such an attack will happen - by next July.

On Monday Wikileaks released a mountain of documents on the war in Afghanistan through the Guardian, the New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel.

The picture painted is chaotic: failed attempts to win the 'hearts and minds' of the Afghan people, numerous incidences of civilian casualties and evidence that both Iran and Pakistan are helping the Taliban.

The volcanic eruption in Iceland didn't just disrupt flights across Europe for a few weeks in April, it also played a role in the downfall of the commander of the United States' operation in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

President Obama yesterday sacked the four star general after comments in a Rolling Stone profile piece came to light. (By the way, here's the full article).

Whilst looking around on the BBC's iPlayer I came across this programme on Richard Nixon.

Titled 'Nixon in the Den' it is a look at the rise and fall of the 37th President of the United States. In it, historian David Reynolds argues that the traits that brought him to the very top - his steely ambition, excruciating work ethic and a deep-seated inferiority complex - also fuelled his eventual downfall.