Saving journalism ...

Tim Porter is reading Phillip Meyer's new book The Vanishing Newspaper, Saving Journalism in the Information Age in which Meyer attempts to prove the link between quality journalism and profitability.

The book has generated much discussion in the US, prompted in part by a piece Meyer wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review in December last year.

In the introduction to his book Meyer says:

"This book is an attempt to isolate and describe the factors that made journalism work as a business in the past and that might also make it work with the changing technologies of the present and the future. … The main value of the work that follows is that it offers a model for looking at the news business that supports our intuitive appreciation for quality and, most importantly, can be transferred to whatever strange forms of media will convey news in the future."

It's the key question for newspapers, and one that's inevitably tied to how they make money.

Here's Porter's summary -
1. The influence model
2. How newspapers make money
3. How advertisers make decisions
4. Credibility and influence
5. Accuracy in reporting
6. Readability
7. Do editors matter?
8. The last line of defence
9. Capacity measures
10. How newspapers were captured by Wall Street
11. Saving journalism
12. What can we do?