Charlie Beckett, Founding Director, POLIS

Charlie Beckett is the founding director of POLIS, the thinktank for research and debate into international journalism and society, a joint initiative between the LSE Media and Communications Department and the London College of Communication. POLIS hosts public lectures and seminars for journalists and the public. It runs Fellowship and Research programmes, and publishes reports on a range of topics including new media and journalism, media and development, financial journalism, and public service broadcasting. Becket has been a programme editor at ITN’s Channel 4 News, and a film-maker and programme editor at BBC News and Current affairs. He was also a Reuters Fellow at Oxford University, where he wrote a field-work based paper on New Technology and Journalism in Uganda. Beckett’s book SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World (Blackwell, 2008) [Amazon.co.uk] is published by Blackwell on 20 May. It describes the crisis facing mainstream journalism and argues that ‘professional’ journalism must be transformed through the integration of the public into the production and dissemination of news. [Read on on his Weblog... Read on on his LSE staff page...]

Session

Panelist: Debate: What is the media for today?