There’s a really good, detailed bit of reporting here from Friday’s Guardian about the near-collapse of local newspapers in some areas.
The starting point that Stephen Moss chose was my old local paper when I was young - The Long Eaton Advertiser.
This bit stood out for me:
“For the older generation, these things matter. “They want to know [...]
Filed under: Community, Conversational localities, The media | 1 Comment »
Two very interesting posts - one via Chris Dillow, and one directly from his site. Firstly, Chris signposts this:
“….perhaps it’s “populist” to think political elites always end up in bed with economic elites, but it seems, as a matter of fact, they often do. My opinion is that a certain “populist” enthusiasm for democracy, in [...]
Filed under: Populism, The media | Tagged: Local newspapers, New Deal of the Mind | No Comments »
A few weeks ago, Roy Greenslade picked up on a growing opposition to Council-run free newspapers.
As he notes, the opposition comes both from smaller political parties locally, and from commercial rivals that are being edged out - as they see it.
Elsewhere, we are seeing growing demands for a journalistic ‘bail-out’ - and not just from [...]
Filed under: Centralisation, Council services, The media | Tagged: Advertising, Journalism, Local newspapers | No Comments »
Interesting report just published by the Pew Research Center, showing that:
Fewer than half of Americans (43%) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community “a lot.” Even fewer (33%) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available.
These stats refer to both [...]
Filed under: The media | No Comments »
About a year ago, I heard snippets of a radio programme that really stuck with me.
I didn’t make a note of the name of the programme at the time (I was driving), and it has taken me best part of the last year plugging away at the few contacts I have in the BEEB’s political [...]
Filed under: Centralisation, The media, Transparency | No Comments »
I’d like to start a national campaign - if you’ll join me in it - in which the columnists who denounce the actions of elected politicians are obliged to step forward, say what they are in favour of themselves, and defend it.
If this were to happen, I’d ask for The Times / Guardian columnist Simon [...]
Filed under: Direct democracy, The media | No Comments »
Bill Thompson thinks that it was cooked up in a smoke-free room, more like.
Along with the OfCOM Public Service Broadcasting review, published recently, these issues are of huge importance.
I say all of this as a prelude to urging you to visit Charlie Beckett’s excellent Polis blog where you can find an ongoing discussion of journalism [...]
Filed under: Public Service Broadcasting, The media | 1 Comment »
This is interesting:
“Ed Balls has called on councils not to undermine local media outlets by trying to compete for readers and advertising revenue with their own publications and websites.”
I wonder if Mr Balls has any plans to ask the local newspaper groups to pay journalists to cover local news with a bit of enthusiasm, accuracy [...]
Filed under: The media | Tagged: Local newspapers | 1 Comment »
One of the founding questions behind this blog is this:
Is the decline in local journalism damaging local democracy?
Well, the consistently good Polis blog managed by Charlie Beckett is addressing it with some energy here. Charlie worked at ITN, C4 News, LWT and the BBC. The post linked to here is a guest post by George [...]
Filed under: Centralisation, The media | Tagged: Decentralisation, Journalism | No Comments »
I’d like to look at how the requirement that is placed upon public broadcasters to be impartial impacts upon the quality of democracy in the UK. It’s a complex question, and I’d like to explore it over a few posts.
‘Impartial’ can mean many things. The most obvious expression of it is in the guidelines that [...]
Filed under: Neutrality, The media | Tagged: BBC, Impartiality, Journalism | 5 Comments »
Here’s quite an old link I stumbled across while googling something else. It doesn’t do to only link to very new posts, does it?
“I don’t believe the intention is to destabilise democracy but that is the effect in many communities where the coverage of local politics has been downgraded by a loss of experienced staff [...]
Filed under: Centralisation, The media | Tagged: Centralisation, Journalism, Media | 1 Comment »
Here’s a really good post that superimposes the work of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill onto the John Sergeant / Strictly Come Dancing débâcle.
Chris asks:
Do we necessarily pick the best people as elected representatives?
Is this a bad thing?
Chris concludes that it shouldn’t be a bad thing, but that our current managerialist democratic institutions [...]
Filed under: The media, What makes a good representative? | Tagged: Elections, Representative democracy | 1 Comment »
Democracy blogs
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Engaging with articulate commenters
I started my blog, Slugger O’Toole in early June 2002 purely as a research tool for a paper I was planning to write on the future of Unionism in Northern Ireland. At the time, I was still trying to assemble the writing team and hadn’t even approached a funding body.
Of course I didn’t need funding to [...]
Filed under: The media, Web 2.0 and democracy | Tagged: Blogging, commenters, engagement, intelligent commons, Slugger O'Tooe | No Comments »