31 July

A prominent journalist on the weekend said that nobody in the media could think of a way to save serious journalism. In a situation like this, it usually means I think that the ideas we’re using don’t fit. In the case of news, here’s my two cents. All news is fake news. It always has been. Not because it’s made-up, but because news has always been a highly selective way of presenting reality to people. It’s always been stories. With the growth of social media and other information technology, people suddenly had thousands of ways to get stories about societies, and even more importantly could now be part of the writing of the stories too, not just reading. I think the ‘serious’ press is disappearing because society doesn’t need people to write stories for them as much any more. What the serious press could do instead - that’s a more interesting question.