My apologies for the break in transmission from this blog, My day job took over completely during the autumn of 2013 and I will try to do better in 2014.
As one year flips over to another, bloggers and others get asked to do pieces summarising the highlights of the year about to end in a style which used to be known in print newsrooms as “pipe-suckers” or “cud-chewers” (my own ruminations here and here). This time round, there was one common denominator to the looks backward and forward. To summarise the summaries, optimism about journalism reappeared.
No one believes that anyone has cracked the problem of a digital business model for news publishing. But there’s a gently rising tide of new things working and the unexpected being tried, sometimes with success. Some time in 2013, without anyone quite marking it, a corner was turned.
I spent the first part of 2013 writing a book (see to the right of this post) which argues that gloom and pessimism about journalism fly in the face of (a) what’s happening outside mainstream newsrooms and (b) history. Like most authors, I thought I was arguing against the prevailing pessimism. I emerged from my study and the seclusion needed to get a book finished to discover that I was pushing at a door not exactly open, but easier to open than I’d thought. The climate of opinion was changing.
