Supermedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World

Beckett's book has been triggered in no small way by the ever increasing pervasiveness of the Web. Within the various modalities of usage are social networking sites and blogs. These let anyone comment on and post original news reports. Nor is this trend restricted to developed countries. Thus Beckett looks at how journalists can stay relevant in a global context. The idea of the long tail also appears. This was popularised by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine in a recent book, Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, where he argued that the Internet lets demand be aggregated for a long tail of items like music and books. Where previously a real world store would not have the space for all these items, or the demand for them in its geographic proximity. Likewise, Beckett posits that journalists can now look for obscure topics and publish about these to a wide audience; while a hardcopy newspaper mode would make this unrealistic. Another idea by Beckett is to harness a so-called collective intelligence of a crowd centred around some topic. The drawback here is a tendency to group think, however.