Starting Out.

I was talking to a young journalist the other day who told me that she had recently gone out and organised herself a newspaper subscription – not because she needs it. She reads everything online. She did it because she felt sorry for newspapers, they were struggling so much. She wanted to support the medium as a matter of principle.

Buying subscriptions out of charity is the sort of thing I do for struggling literary magazines and alternative media. I don’t necessarily read them. I just like to know they exist. The idea that young people might now regard hard copy newspapers in the same light is to say the least symptomatic.

On the other hand, quite a few years ago now I took out a charity subscription to a struggling online publication called Crikey. Now I not only read it, I write for it – and they pay me. It’s not charity any more.So what does all this mean? Well, what we know already – that things are changing fast in media.

A good time, then to start this blog, named after my book, which was published last year, and as is the way of dead tree technology, was soon out of date in the detail, although I still think I got the thrust right.

My background: You can read all about it here. A dead tree journalist of more than twenty five years experience, now learning fast about new media, and exploring what’s good and bad about journalism as it has been practiced, and working out ways of carrying the good into the new media age. More on this in later posts.

One of the things I am currently involved with is setting up the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism, and I’ll be writing about progress here. For a heads-up, this piece in The Australian Media section last Monday covered it well.

So that’s for starters. Watch this space.