Nick Kristof reports in his column in the New York Times that only four American newspapers now have foreign desks. But foreign correspondents are to some extent being replaced by freelance citizen journalists who reporting from places that newspapers that can no longer afford to send foreign correspondents, publishing their stories on sites like Demotix.

I don't propose to answer this question myself, for fear of being either lynched by a baying mob of subs, or told to clear my desk by the men at the top...but here's a very interesting piece from the Independent on Sunday about London freesheet City AM's decision to axe its sub-editing staff.

For me the central issue is that raised by 'an insider':-

Every week there's a new claim from one of Britain's newspapers that theirs is now the most popular website among UK users.

The Guardian was up there for a while, the Telegraph claimed it, and now the Mail.

The cries from Wall Street Journal staffers have been apocalyptic, warning us of impending doom. Said one, "The [Murdoch-owned] New York Post and Fox News are grotesque, fearsome mutants of what newsrooms should be." Said one of their unions, "[Murdoch] has shown a willingness to crush quality and independence." But, who's to say what a newsroom "should be"? Who has the right to determine the criteria against which "quality" is judged?

Go back to Part 1 Redundant - in more ways than one

Man vs Machine

I see Tom Kummer, the former LA-based writer for the Süddeutsche Zeitung who made up celebrity interviews and got away with it for years before finally getting busted, is now working a tennis teacher (see the link to an interview with him on the right-hand side of this page).But maybe we'll all (or most of us, anyway) will eventually end up as tennis teachers - or something?The Independent, which, since going "compact" in 2003 has turned itself from a newspaper to a "viewspaper" in at attempt to stop the decline in readership (with some s