I recently chaired a discussion at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, on how digitization is revolutionising our world. It started with an interview with Heather Brooke, the journalist and free speech campaigner, promoting her new book.  The discussion (on the record – no Chatham House rule applying to this event) concluded that digital technology was breaking down geographic, …

The freeing of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito by an Italian court this week revealed some awful gaffes by the media trying to rush to judgement. Numerous outlets, on hearing the word guilty (relating to slander) assumed it was guilty of all charges and pressed “publish” on pre-prepared stories. The most egregious of these was The Daily Mail which included …

What happens when your firm’s operations are hit by not one physical disaster but three in quick succession? And the CEO is on the other side of the world, far removed from the centre of operations? This interview with Howard Stringer of Sony looks at how he responded when Sony’s Japanese production facilities were hit by first the earthquake, then …

By far the best book on journalism I read was “The Elements of Journalism” by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in the US – part of the Pew Center. When I ran BBC News I bought a copy for every editor (and one or two of them may even have read it). Now …

Last week was a big week in the Edelman calender: the publication of our annual Trust Barometer. Our CEO Richard Edelman has written up the headlines and changes here. Among the many intriguing results were the views on Trust in the Media. The survey is a global one, taken from an actively media engaged, educated, business community. Overall, this year …

There’s been much discussion and speculation about the visit of China’s leader, President Hu Jintao to Washington this week. Just what was discussed in his talks with Barack Obama in the White House? I think I may be able to offer an exclusive insight. Fifteen months ago I had my own personal meeting with President Hu in Beijing. Here’s how …

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford is publishing a study I’ve written on the future of International News. Downloads or purchasable here. Here’s the introduction: Foreign news is undergoing a transformation. For more than a hundred years the principal means of learning about events in the rest of the world has been through the reporting of …

Alan Mutter – a former newspaper executive,Silicon Valley CEO and academic at Berkeley Journalism School has renewed the call for american journalism to abandon any pretence at objectivity. “It’s time to retire the difficult-to-achieve and impossible-to-defend conceit that journalists are now, or ever were, objective. Let’s replace this threadbare notion with a realistic and credible standard of transparency that requires …

The Media Standards Trust has a new study published into the delcine of international reporting in the British Press. “Shrinking World” estimates that in parts of the British press, foreign coverage has fallen by almost 40 per cent since 1979, now making up only just over a tenth of stories in the paper. It concludes: “Many of the changes in …

An interesting week to visit the US with some historic mid-term elections producing the biggest vote against a sitting President for more than 70 years. There’s been plenty of analysis of the results so I won’t indulge myself.   (Except to note, as my colleague Marshall Manson has pointed out,  Bill Clinton managed to deliver results in the face of a hostile Congress …