The winds of ... (The Economist)
(T)he plight of the news business does not presage the end of news. As large branches of the industry wither, new shoots are rising. The result is a business that is smaller and less profitable, but also more efficient and innovative.
via The news business: Tossed by a gale | The Economist.
New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some—like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with interactive maps of the protagonists’ networks of influence, and NightJack, the revealing and depressing blog of an anonymous British policeman, which won the Orwell prize last month—enhance society’s understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.
From the same issue, a leader: Media: The rebirth of news | The Economist.
Many of the hard lessons being learned around the industry this year and last are assembled in one place in these pieces from The Economist, living up to its reputation as the best source in the world for carefully selected obituaries. No, wait, just kidding; of course it is the best place in the world to find those one or two obits you need to read per fortnight (this week: Margaret Gelling, “expert on British place names”). But taken together, and even taken separately, the editorial and the news story show a better than fair understanding of what has happened (“The main victim is not so much the newspaper . . . as the conventional news package”) and what might happen next.