Out of Print

George Brock is a professor and former head of the prestigious Graduate School of Journalism at City University London. During his career as a journalist he worked for the Observer and The Times, where he was Foreign Editor, Managing Editor and Saturday Editor. He has served as president of the World Editors Forum and is on the board of the International Press Institute. He is a regular commentator on news and journalism in the UK and global media and is an active conference speaker and reviewer.

Chapter - 00: Introduction: from ink to link;
Chapter - 01: Communicating whatever we please;
Chapter - 02: Furnishing the world with a new set of nerves;
Chapter - 03: The gilded age;
Chapter - 04: The engine of opportunity;
Chapter - 05: Rethinking journalism again;
Chapter - 06: The business model crumbles;
Chapter - 07: Credibility crumbles;
Chapter - 08: The Leveson judgement;
Chapter - 09: Throwing spaghetti at the wall;
Chapter - 10: Clues to the future

"When George Brock talks, in his excellent book, about the "disruption" of the net, the atomisation of news and opinion, he evokes echoes of a different era: an unruly world of vituperation, agitation, even revolution. But this time it may not be the melee of new voices that crowded the pages of centuries past. This time it's a higgledy-piggledy high-tech empowerment that politicians (and editors) can't control."

"The great virtue of Brock's book is that it deals comprehensively, intelligently and unsentimentally with the entire range of major questions about journalism now [...] it is the best single source available for context about the situation as a whole."

"Brock's stance is refreshing and the book is a pleasure to read."

"Seeking to reassure the doom-mongers, [George Brock] delves back into the history of journalism and demonstrates the shaky beginnings and rapid innovation that powered news journalism for three centuries before the maturation and slow decline of the business in the 20th century. His précis of the history is fascinating and elegantly done."

"Brock is a journalist at heart. His confession at the start of the book reveals that in ample measure. The book is in some ways a response to a taunt by a business columnist that had doubted the ability of a journalism professor to offer credible and useful advice on business. By the time you finish reading the book, you realise that Brock has more than addressed that concern [...] What clearly stands out in Brock's analysis is his articulation of the changing paradigm of the journalism business."

"...optimistic without being sentimental, thought-provoking without being pretentious and realistic without being harsh, which makes it comforting for someone with a keen interest in seeing journalism prevail and hopefully eye-opening for those who wish to better understand it."