About

I'm a journalist. For years I worked in industry but decided to return to my first profession a couple of years back and it's great…. My first name is taken from the composer Haydn, the surname, Shaughnessy is Irish.

What's the purpose of this blog?  Like millions of people out there I believe that established or conventional media organisations are dying off.

Like the tobacco industry they will choose any number of alternatives rather than gracefully accept their time as dominant communications' leaders is over. They will continue to award themselves prizes for excellence on an annual basis. There will be more awards and more back slapping but none of that will change the reality.

They're dying off not because a new breed of communications' options has opened up but because they are morally confused. When they had the chance to widen the media franchise to more people they refused. When they had the option of searching the collective conscience to  mount the appropriate critiques of politicians, they went sideways and opted to turn television into a series of formats. I think the biggest challenge they have ever faced grows out of the moral inadequacies of these organisations.

What will replace them is dialogue and creativity. Look at it blossoming.

One of the key areas is IP TV or TV delivered over the Internet either in managed netwoks by telecommunications companies or by ISPs.

Those developments carry with them an emormously wide range of cultural changes. The mass media are a cornerstone of our economies, as well as being the prime movers of any culture that has wide resonance. We buy and sell most goods through TV – how much more significant could it be?

As the mass media changes so too does society.

This blog is one attempt to track those changes and to comment on them. It might carry a comment on how advertising will have to adapt – and will do so willingly – a comment of moral lapses by the big media organisations or interviews with and profiles of new media leaders. It could be something tangential like the slow death of surrealism or a great new IP TV show.

I write regularly in the Irish Times but sadly the site is subscription based so to read my stuff you need to pay Euro 2 for a day pass.  In the past I've written in the Wall St Journal, The Times, New Statesman, Radio Times, NRC Handelsblad, New Society (now deceased), and the Times Higher Education Supplement.