Wordblog

Jackie Ashley had a thoughtful piece in the Guardian yesterday, headed “Beware the powerful when they hail the new democracy“, in which she wrote:

Every serious newspaper has dived into the internet age, even though it is not yet clear how they will raise the revenue they need as their print existence shrivels. Much of this is merely practical, the result of a technological shift nobody can halt or resist. But it comes with a grand-sounding manifesto about bringing in a new age of democracy, and that’s really what needs to be questioned.

I don’t agree with all she says but I had been planning for a week or more to post on this topic. It has struck me since I started blogging how very small is the community in which I am blogging. Voices that I hear every day are missing from what is really a conversation of the converted.

It was one reason why I did not suggest, as a couple of commenters have, that the future for Tribune, the left newspaper, was on the web. It seemed to me that a substantial part of the paper’s audience were was not likely to follow it online, if that was the way it went.

I am still thinking about what I want to say, but in the meantime read Ashley’s views.