James Button has a thoughtful and interesting interview with John Lloyd in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Lloyd has helped to found the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. Opened in November, it plans to analyse a profession he believes is too little studied. This is remarkable, given its power. Compare the amount it is studied with the scrutiny of politics or law. Part of the problem is that the media usually do a poor job of reflecting on themselves.

Lloyd, the institute’s director of journalism, plans to get journalists thinking and writing about what they do. How, for example, do they balance ethical priorities against the commercial demands of employers? How will the digital age change reporting? Lloyd knows of few centres anywhere trying to answer such questions (the University of Melbourne is believed to be planning a similar project). He thinks that, for journalism’s health, that has to change.

The idea for the institute came to him when he returned to London in 1996 after five years as Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times. Before that, he had worked in television, edited Time Out and the moderate-left magazine New Statesman, and was British Journalist of the Year in 1984. But an insight changed him from being merely in the media to a thinker about the media.

In Russia, people relied almost totally on new newspapers and television stations for political information. That was unsurprising: the all-powerful Soviet state had collapsed and parties and the non-government sector were still too frail to command the political stage.

But in Britain, with its long history of civic institutions, Lloyd observed the same phenomenon. On the Labour side, unions had lost power. The many local and patriotic organisations linked to the Conservatives had atrophied. Neither party retained a large membership base; almost no one attended political meetings.

Instead, the media had become “almost the monopoly carrier of political messages”. If politicians wanted to speak to the people, they had nowhere to go but to a camera or a reporter’s notebook. In Britain, Russia and elsewhere, the fields had effectively merged. Politics had become media…

Thanks to Adrian Monck for the link.

Wonderful rant by Joel Stein in the LA Times (free subscription required).

Here’s what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don’t listen to them either. That sound on the phone, Mom, is me typing.

Some newspapers even list the phone numbers of their reporters at the end of their articles. That’s a smart use of their employees’ time. Why not just save a step and have them set up a folding table at a senior citizen center with a sign asking for complaints?

Where does this end? Does Philip Roth have to put his e-mail at the end of his book? Does Tom Hanks have to hold up a sign with his e-mail at the end of his movie? Should your hotel housekeeper leave her e-mail on your sheets? Are you starting to see how creepy this is?

Not everything should be interactive. A piece of work that stands on its own, without explanation or defense, takes on its own power. If Martin Luther put his 95 Theses on the wall and then all the townsfolk sent him their comments, and he had to write back to all of them and clarify what he meant, some of the theses would have gotten all watered down and there never would have been a Diet of Worms. And then, for the rest of history, elementary school students learning about the Reformation would have nothing to make fun of. You can see how dangerous this all is.

I get that you have opinions you want to share. That’s great. You’re the Person of the Year. I just don’t have any interest in them. First of all, I did a tiny bit of research for my column, so I’m already familiar with your brilliant argument. Second, I’ve already written my column, so I can’t even steal your ideas and get paid for them.

There is no practical reason to send your rants to me…

Great stuff. Worth reading in full.

From BBC NEWS

The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on…

Now, here’s something that couldn’t have happened without the Web — MilBlogs, a webring of Blogs by serving and retired US military personnel.