Supermedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World

By Charlie Beckett

SuperMedia is a lively, engaging, and refreshingly-opinionated text offering informed discussion on the importance and future of liberal journalism as a healthy part of a flourishing society. Examines the profound changes journalism is undergoing for social, economic and technological reasons Explores the potential for a entirely new type of journalism which these changes create, discussing the impact of social networking sites and blogs on traditional journalism, and making the case that journalism could be the catalyst for change needed to solve many of the world's problems in a controversial manner Written by a first class broadcast journalist, it provides a practical roadmap for identifying the issues and solutions that will ensure an open and reliable news media for generations to come

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1405179236
• ISBN13: 9781405179232
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 205 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

promises of the Internet for global journalism

Beckett's book has been triggered in no small way by the ever increasing pervasiveness of the Web. Within the various modalities of usage are social networking sites and blogs. These let anyone comment on and post original news reports. Nor is this trend restricted to developed countries. Thus Beckett looks at how journalists can stay relevant in a global context. The idea of the long tail also appears. This was popularised by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine in a recent book, Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, where he argued that the Internet lets demand be aggregated for a long tail of items like music and books. Where previously a real world store would not have the space for all these items, or the demand for them in its geographic proximity. Likewise, Beckett posits that journalists can now look for obscure topics and publish about these to a wide audience; while a hardcopy newspaper mode would make this unrealistic. Another idea by Beckett is to harness a so-called collective intelligence of a crowd centred around some topic. The drawback here is a tendency to group think, however.