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I am a journalist who believes deeply in the mission of journalism. Democracies need strong, independent news organisations to help maintain free societies, but as I think about whether Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations, I think of what American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote:

Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that

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This is the first US presidential election that I haven’t covered in the US since 1992, and while it hasn’t been my primarily focus this autumn, I’ve still followed the race very intently. Occasionally, I’ve even done a bit of analysis for The Guardian and also for a project for Mick Fealty of Slugger O’ Toole fame. However, after covering 2000 and 2004 for the BBC and then 2008 for The Guardian, this has definitely been watching the race from afar. 

Some things haven’t changed, or really have got much worse. The permanent campaign that began back in the Clinton era

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During this period of disruption and transition, we journalists wring our hands about any number of things, and I suppose the thing I do genuinely worry about is local news. I’m not alone, and it’s spawned a huge number of hyperlocal experiments. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, most of these experiments have failed to develop into sustainable models for the future. At SXSW in the US, they had a panel looking called the “Hyperlocal Hoax: Where’s the Holy Grail?” The intro to the panel said:

Over the last decade, so called “Hyperlocal” websites, apps and services have been “the

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Ada Lovelace Day, the international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering & maths that I launched in 2009, has gone from strength to strength in the last three years. I’ve been amazed at how much support it’s garnered and how much enthusiasm there is for it.

This year, it has become really clear to me that there’s a lot more that I could do with Ada Lovelace Day, if only we had a bit of cash to pay for it. Since its inception, Ada Lovelace Day has been run entirely by volunteers and by partnering with organisations like

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Last week, the Journal Register Company announced their second bankruptcy in three years and I said on Twitter that I worried that digital first, as a strategy rather than the name of JRC’s parent company, was losing any positive connotation for journalists.

I fear that “Digital First” has become not a sign of anything positive for journalists but just a corporate code-word for deep cuts.

— Mr Anderson (@kevglobal) September 6, 2012

Like a similar comment I made about Advance/Newhouse Newspapers digital first strategy in cutting its print production days, my thoughts on the matter have a lot more nuance

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Last week, WAN-IFRA said what many of us in digital journalism have known for a while, that we’re losing the battle for attention. They said that digital news audiences lack the same “intensity” of print audiences. Put simply, digital audiences are less loyal and spend less time with each digital news source. WAN-IFRA CEO Christoph Riess has put the problem this way:

We are not losing readers, we are losing readership. Our industry challenge is engagement. Because someone is a subscriber does not make him a loyalist.

Several people in the industry have been trying to raise the alarm for

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Every once and a while reading comments on a good blog is rewarded. I’m an avid reader of Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur. His recent post on Big Data is well worth reading.

To date, publishers have applied the same business model to everything from print and the web to the latest mobile and social platforms: Build the biggest possible audience.

This approach, unfortunately, is exactly at odds with the point of Big Data, whose goal is to connect individuals with information specifically tailored to them.

The quicker Big Data applications develop, the faster the large but un-targetable audiences traditionally delivered

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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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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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