Contents

About the author

Acknowledgements

Introduction: from ink to link

01 Communicating whatever we please

Messy, unethical and opinionated origins

Select and noteworthy happenings

An explosion of opinion

Playing with fire

‘Bible, ax and newspapers’

A brief flowering

The world’s great informer

Every species of intelligence

02 Furnishing the world with a new set of nerves

A great moral organ

The true Church of England

The Steam Intellect Society

We are all learning to move together

A vast agora

I order five virgins

The few dozen lines of drivel

A press typhoon

The waning power of the harlot

03 The gilded age

A fluid mass

The brute force of monopoly

Sorrow, sorrow, ever more

A well-conducted press

‘So will it be goodbye to Fleet Street?’

I really loathe people with power

Deregulation

Boom and decline

Owners, news and celebrity

04 The engine of opportunity

Chain reaction

Utopia or dystopia?

What the internet does to the business of news

05 Rethinking journalism again

Complexity

Frontiers fade and vanish

Ink marks on squashed trees

Comparison and choice

The downside risks of choice

Authority

Manipulation

Objectivity under strain

The advantages and drawbacks of institutions

The management of abundance

New media and change: a case study

Conclusion

06 The business model crumbles

Over a cliff

Print is not dead

Palliative care for print

Flipping to digital

Making people pay: walls and meters

The demand for news

What we don’t know about online news

07 Credibility crumbles

Newsroom culture

Operation Motorman

Phone hacking

‘Quality’ and ‘seriousness’

Trust and authority

A spell is broken

08 The Leveson judgement

Diagnosis

Prescription

A third way

Regulation’s future

Plurality

09 Throwing spaghetti at the wall

Four core tasks

We were having journalistic moments!

Error is useful

10 Clues to the future

Business models

From the ashes of dead trees

Index