Skip to main content

Nieman Journalism Lab - David Levy and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen on the future of journalism beyond America’s borders

15 Apr 2011

Much of the discussion in the United States about the future of journalism has tended to revolve around a cluster of key themes: What are the business models for digital news? Is there a market failure for journalism? How can news organizations incorporate amateur journalists into their production routines? Is online aggregation theft? But American conversations only occasionally allude to changes in news in the rest of the world, and those rarely go further than discussions about the European public media system — which, while important, does not exhaust the range of journalism in Europe or elsewhere.As David Levy, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute and an assistant professor at Roskilde University in Denmark, note in their new book, The Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy, “There is not one [journalism] crisis, but different crises in different countries.” And, as Nielsen argues, “simply parroting points from the American debate is rarely a good way of understanding the situation elsewhere — and sometimes the emerging consensus in this debate isn’t even sufficient for understanding the US itself!” Read C. W. Anderson's interview with David and Rasmus on the Nieman Journalism Lab website.