From the point of view of consumers of all classes and tastes, we in Britain are surely living in a golden age of media. BBC arts programming or newspaper foreign news coverage may not be what it once was—but the new media, from art gallery websites to foreign correspondent bloggers, more than make up for any shortfall in the old. The trouble is that this golden age is thought by many to be a brief prelude to headlong decline, at least in the public interest journalism that keeps governments and institutions on their toes. For the new web-based media are taking enough readers and advertisers from the old media to damage its business model without having the inclination or resources to continue its boring-but-worthy coverage of local legislatures, law courts, planning inquiries and so on. One of the reasons that the new media cannot replace the serious bits of the old is that people are used to getting it for nothing. In theory that could be reversed—we could even go further and tax email, as Edward Gottesman suggests—but the industry consensus is that it is now too late to charge. That leaves state subsidy or philanthropy to fill the gap. Instead of endowing university chairs, perhaps trusts or philanthropists will, in future, pay for investigative reporters. (This already happens at the trust-owned Guardian, one of the few British papers that still puts money into investigations.)
Our cover story takes us to the heart of this debate, with two leading American commentators slugging it out over whether the web will be the making or the undoing of serious journalism. The situation in the US is not exactly the same as here. Over there, most big newspapers were until quite recently regional monopolies, which means that their crisis is somewhat further advanced. Moreover, America has no licence-fee funded BBC (see our interview with Mark Thompson, the director general, in the next issue) to guarantee a healthy minimum of public interest journalism. But in many other respects the US is a guide to our own future—and more similar to Europe than we imagine in most respects, as Peter Baldwin argues.
British voters seem to be moving to the left— judging by their apparent support for a big increase in state activism—yet are likely to elect a centre-right government next year. Equally curious positions are revealed in our poll to accompany David Willetts's reflections on why, 30 years on, he is no longer a Thatcherite. Most voters think Maggie would do a better job than Gordon Brown or David Cameron and yet nearly 60 per cent think one of her emblematic policies—utility privatisation—was wrong.
