Roy Greenslade, a veteran British newspaper editor (of the Mirror) and now a prof and a media commentator for the Guardian, has started a blog to aggregate and comment on media news. I already find it every bit as useful and in many ways more compelling than the required reading in American media, Romenekso.
No disrespect to Romenesko intended. He is what E&P would be if E&P weren’t E&P, if it had updated for the new age when it dawned instead of dawned on them. He gives us news, quaintly echoing the old traditions of American newspapering, trying to take it right down the middle (and then silently suffering the arrows of those who says he doesn’t). Just the links, ma’am. He is indispensible.
Greenslade is more selective. He’s not trying to cover every move by news businesses. He’s trying to find stories that matter to media and not just in the UK. And though those selections have perspective, he also writes separate analyses, pithy with perspective. For example:
Scoop journalism is hopelessly old-fashioned. There’s that nice Richard Wallace, editor of the Daily Mirror, landing scoop after scoop – Kate Moss snorting, McCartneys’ marriage aborting, John Prescott cavorting – and yet his paper’s sales continue their sad decline. One glitch is that, despite producing spoof early editions, the rest of the digitised media world can catch up and even overtake in a nano-second. So plenty of readers (and, obviously, surfers) have no clue that it was the Mirror wot got it. But that’s not the only problem with red-top scoopery. The truth is that even in the old deadline-midnight era scoops didn’t matter to readers. They have always been much more about Fleet Street machismo than satisfying the real desires of readers. Mind you, I bet The Sun’s editor, Rebekah Wade, doesn’t see it that way!
(I agreed on scoops here.)
And he joined in the discussion of journalists blogging with some gems. He acknowledges coming from the past but he has no real reluctance about joining the future. The best indication of that is that he doesn’t turn this into a long column and he’s not too proud to do what’s really valuable onine: aggregate.
I recommend that you add Greenslade to your RSS reader and your daily reading.
