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The end of the journalists’ monopoly

Tom Streithorst

With YouTube, everyone can be a director now

“It’s 2010—time to get off of the Titanic and get onto the lifeboats,” Kevin Anderson, the Guardian’s digital research editor, told me. I wasn’t pleased. I thought: ”But the Titanic has an orchestra, a well-stocked bar, fine Egyptian cotton sheets. The lifeboats have nothing but freezing cold water.” I was at an event at the Frontline Club which sought to ask how the news industry will survive the next decade. Will the internet save it, or kill it? I came out convinced the internet will be good for journalism, but probably be bad for me, a journalist.

For news consumers, the internet rocks. Wikipedia allows us to find out everything about just about anything—no need to take the bus to the British Library. The best writing about the financial crisis hasn’t been from traditional journalists but rather in blogs from academics like Simon Johnson or traders like Barry Ritholtz. Riverbendblog may have been opinionated and occasionally inaccurate, but it gave a better picture of life in Baghdad in the dark days of 2005-06 than any western journalist could. Ten years ago we would not have heard these voices. Now they are omnipresent.

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Absolutely nothing in the news

Jonathan Power

Obama: a new serious tone to worldwide peacemaking

It seems fashionable to argue that the wheels are coming off Barack Obama’s foreign policy. It’s a position which the distinguished American scholar Philip Bobbitt stakes out in the most recent edition of Prospect. But, in truth, nothing much is happening in foreign affairs—and even if he himself had not earned his peace price, President Obama reflects the new era of tranquility over which he presides.

Let’s look at the ledger. Iraq has all but disappeared from the front page. Afghanistan and Pakistan remain, but even here investors are still steadily upping their investments in Pakistan, presumably judging that the conflict is being over-hyped. The argument with Iran over whether it is building nuclear weapons drags on, despite the forgotten report of the CIA two years ago, which found that Iran was probably not. Iran now says it might ship some of its used uranium to Russia to be converted into fuel (to provide medical isotopes) or else import from Europe, instead of manufacturing its own. The argument should now be relatively easy to wrap up.

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