Why I Won't Miss Press Gazette

Because for all its “impact and authority”, *Press Gazette *was
never really like that for me. For one reason or another, I’ve found
myself working in the trade magazine niche of specialish magazines, and
the whole specialist magazine sector was never well covered by Press Gazette.
Journalism is a broad church, if you’ll excuse the cliche. Print
publications aren’t great at covering sucha  range of activity – but
the internet excells at it.

I think the lack of centralisation of the discussion about digital
journalism is one of its strengths: it’s dozens of over-lapping niche
discussions. The fact that ideas and debates move between journalism
educators, and local hacks, and trade journalists, and national press
hacks is one of the joys of the new way of talking about journalism,
and any new site has to acknowledge and be part of that.
Journalism.co.uk has done that very successfully, I think, which is why
I have far more affection for it than for the Media Guardian, which is
still more of the “we are the centre” model.

Pushing for one centralised hub for discussion feels, to me, like
another example of harking back to the pre-internet days when there
could be one or two dominant players.

What Martin is calling for already exists.Genuine debate and discussion is happening now, in this
blog post, in hundreds like it, in forums and on Twitter and in
ever-increasing numbers of places across the web. There are probably
more words being published about journalism right now than at *any *other
time in its history. And if we don’t learn the lesson of that, and
realise that that is happening to every industry, hobby and interest,
then many, many more journalistic jobs will be lost.