Hello and welcome to Not Another One, with me, Steve Richards, Miranda Green, Ian Martin, Tim Montgomery. And today, if it's okay with all of you,

we thought we would reflect on the fast-moving media landscape. Obviously, within the specific

context of this highly charged debate about the use of social media to encourage, trigger,

coordinate the rioting in English towns and cities, but also more widely, the media landscape

is changing in so many different ways. And we've all had very different experiences as journalists within that landscape,

which I'm going to ask each of us to talk about briefly. And then we're going to look at

the good side, the bad side, whether it can be regulated and so on. So let's just talk about

our own experiences in the media. It's very different. I mean, Tim, in a way, you were one of the early innovators of the new landscape. You set up

conservative home, which was a really interesting example of using the internet to set up a website

which both was innovative in its analysis of tory politics and also

influential became a a player just just talk briefly about that as your kind of big example of the

new media world yeah it was also very old-fashioned and outdated now sort of a blog with lots of words on compared to Twitter, etc. now.

But yeah, really it was watching what was happening in America, often the case, that gave me the inspiration to do conservative home.

And it was the beginning, I suppose, of this phenomenon we're seeing all over the world now

where you can talk to very narrow groups. You know, people often used to say don't preach to the

choir. But that's what Conservative Home was. It was all about the choir. I wasn't interested in

anyone else. Often I was only interested in you know

i wrote blogs for two or three people i wanted them to to to read it um and you know it's

i loved it one of the proudest things i have done but i do reflect a lot on my part in what is a massive segregation of conversation.

You know, we used to gather all at the same places to learn and discuss with each other.

That had problems, but there was a national identity and a national conversation that we have lost because of social media.

I'm very grateful for it and I now think of myself more as a journalist and a politician.

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