newspapers

Times Higher Education invited me to review a collection of essays taken from Cardiff University's conference on the future of newspapers and edited by Professor Bob Franklin. The collection contains some fascinating and valuable contributions. You can read my review here

Unfazed by the closure of the London paper and London Lite, a new freesheet has emerged on the streets of London. Called The Blogpaper, it's a printed version of blog postings culled from the internet, and its first monthly edition hit the streets on a small scale on 20 November. Issue two is due on 18 December.

It's not entirely a new idea. In the US the Chicago-based Printed Blog lasted 16 issues before closing in July, while in Argentina a title called Oblogo has reached issue number 26 with a circulation of around 15,000. But the Blogpaper's USP, according to its founders, is that it will not have an editor.

These are baffling times indeed for London's newspaper readers. Just weeks after Rupert Murdoch decides to close his afternoon freesheet the londonpaper, on the grounds that it was losing money, the Evening Standard's new owner decides that the best strategy is to stop charging for it.  Alexander Lebedev's company has announced it will drop the 50p cover price and double the distribution to around 600,000.

It's not our Rochester, but the one in New York state. Still, here's a fantastic example of a newspaper looking for new ways to engage its community, particularly those under the age of 40. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle has joined forces with a local college to develop a series of online and real world games that aim to entertain, engage and help inform its readers.

As part of the development of this site I've been working on an aggregration page that pulls together all of the most recent posts from the top bloggers in medialand. It's not a particularly complex thing to achieve, but it has got me thinking about the notion of Fair Use of content from external sites. How much of that content, supplied in a handy format by those bloggers in their RSS feeds, is it reasonable to present on this site as long as it includes a link back to the original? All of it? The headline and intro? Will we be driving traffic their way? Or gaining traffic of our own at their expense. And should I be asking permission to do so? In a minuscule way, it reflects the argument that has raged on and off between Google and newspaper publishers for much of the last decade and has recently flared up again with a vengeance.

The chances are most mornings you will find me with my head buried in a copy of the Guardian, devouring my daily dosage of news and comment. It has become ritualistic and I've got the ink-stained fingers to show for it.

But it seems as if I am of a dying breed.

Michael Jackson: 1958 -2009

I was quite happily minding my own business last night, I was watching Sky Sports News getting the latest on what the British and Irish Lions were doing and how they were going to avenge their defeat to South Africa last weekend in the first of three tests.

Recently, when working weird hours and drinking unconsumable amounts of coffee (for a normal person) for the politics essay - How far have the constitutional reforms introduced since 1997 strengthened or weakened the democracy in Britain? - I came across a small paragraph, which was meant to spark (youth) interest in general politics. It was meant as a foundational piece.

Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption) is the title of an essay by Paul Starr in The New Republic (America's most consistently intelligent political magazine and a must-read for anyone determined to understand life inside the Washington DC beltway). I urge everyone to read it. It is depressing, but erudite and utterly right. A new democratic deficit looms. We journalists must urgently find a way to fill it.