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Editor & Publisher interviewed US humourist and syndicated newspaper columnist Dave Berry after he won 2013 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement award, and the interview was excerpted on the blog Newspaper Death Watch. When asked why newspapers have cut down on their humour columns, Berry responded:

Newspapers have had a consistent problem over the past 30 to 40 years that whenever they are offered two options, they always pick the one that is more boring and less desirable to readers.

Personally, I attribute the modern failure of newspapers to English majors. We let our business be run by English majors, but

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Professor Chris Frost, the Head of Journalism at Liverpool John Moores University, has testified before the Leveson inquiry “in in his role as Chairman of the National Union of Journalists Ethics Council, alongside NUJ General Secretary, Michelle Stanistreet”, and I think he raised a point that is important not only with respect to the press corruption scandal in Britain but also in a lot of other debates that we’re currently having in terms of rights and responsibilities in democratic societies. I’ve heard a number of times recently people confuse freedom of the press with freedom of speech or of expression. These are

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Strange Attractor has now permanently moved to charman-anderson.com. Please pop over there to to read and comment on the full version of this post. Thank you!

As I’ve often written here, I feel very blessed by how rich and rewarding my career has been after taking a buyout from the Guardian in 2010. I’ve travelled the world, working with journalism organisations and journalists to help them seize their digital future, and that prepared me for my current as the editor of Knowledge Bridge, a project of the Media Development Loan Fund, to help news organisations in emerging democracies make the transition to digital media. 

With all of the turmoil in the industry, I often speak with former colleagues and friends in the business who are facing

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