Yet another blog about the future of media?

A few years ago, after I won the European Parliament Prize for Journalism for a post on my politics blog, I told an interviewer that I believed that the arrival of the web heralded a new golden age for journalism (see below, or click to listen).

This – despite all the challenges that the industry still faces – I still believe.

In the last few weeks we’ve seen the launch of FiveThirtyEight, Vox and The Upshot, all trying new things that wouldn’t have been possible pre-internet.

In the last year or so, we’ve seen the rise and rise of Quartz, News Corp buy the excellent Storyful, the Mirror Group launch the interesting – and so far seemingly successful – experiments UsvsTh3m and Ampp3d, and Buzzfeed continue to expand into the realm of the serious (as well as other languages), fuelled by their success in the silly.

And that’s not to mention the increasingly experimental news apps, from Circa to Yahoo News Digest, Reuters’ WiderImage and Zite, all of which are experimenting with the vast, mostly still untapped potential of the splicing of internet and media.

Plus, of course, we’re all still in the near aftermath of Snowfall – that experimental form that got everyone so excited before the backlash began, but that did, at least, prove that the web can be about so much more than just articles, videos and photo galleries. I’ve even had a go at this myself in the day job via Microsoft’s own experimental Digital Narratives, a medium with a world of potential.

Over the last few years I’ve had the pleasure of attending a number of News:Rewired conferences, hosted by my colleagues at MSN UK and organised by the fine folk at Journalism.co.uk.

At these and other events, be they blogger meetups or the small number of Hacks/Hackers events I’ve managed to attend, I’ve met or listened to too many interesting people with interesting ideas to list.

At the same time, there seems to be more interesting coverage of the world of media now than ever – especially of that intersection of media and technology that is the internet. And with this coverage comes more interesting discussion. (I’ve been deeply envious of all those at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia at the moment, and have been avidly following on Twitter.)

Recently I’ve been enjoying posting the occasional comment on LinkedIn about the media/online world in which I’ve been earning my living for the last decade and a half. But the discussions on LinkedIn can be limited by the forum itself – people are reluctant to speak freely on a platform that’s little more than a glorified CV repository.

Using my existing blog to talk about my fascination with the ongoing evolution of journalism doesn’t seem quite right – that’s got 11 years’ worth of posts about European politics, with only occasional digressions on the media and the web.

And so I’m starting up this blog to give myself more space to work out my own ideas on the future of news (and how to fund it), as well as the web and communication than in any expectation of interesting anyone else. But all contributions and discussions will be most welcome – be they here (once I’ve got comments set up, at least, or elsewhere.

Journalists following the dodo?: Interview with James Clive-Matthews by tuulitoivanen