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These are the notes from a talk I gave to a mixture of Spanish academics, journalists and students at the Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid. My host was the Survival of Journalism Project of the Madrid Complutense University. This was a chance for me to do two things. Firstly, to take a self-indulgent look back five years to the predictions I made in my first book, SuperMedia, and further back 25 years to the start of my journalism career. But I wanted to look back to look forward and try to define the nature of the journalism business model problem in the digital era and to start to explore ways of solving it.

Croydon: land of opportunity

This is Croydon as I remember it in the mid 1980s. This was the high point of Thatcherite market economics. It was pretty much a boom time for Britain fueled by North Sea Oil, the Big Bang in the City and free market forces liberating the pent up profits of public services like Gas and Telecomms through privatisation.

This photography shows the Croydon Whitgift Centre, one of the temples of English consumerist urban planning. I started my career in Croydon on a new free newspaper chain that represented the kind of entrepreneurship that was breathing new life into traditional industries like journalism at the time. Elsewhere Murdoch was ‘rescuing’ the Times and smashing the print unions. Continue reading →

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