Revolutionary highway (Inside Story)

Humans have always craved and shared news. News journalism started to emerge after the Gutenberg Revolution in the fifteenth century eventually blossoming as a profession with the Industrial Revolution and the invention of a clutch of mass media technologies that characterised the twentieth century. Then, on the eve of the twenty-first century, another revolution, as profound as the Gutenberg, started a new wave of even more complex and layered transformations. We are in the "one-reeler" stage of that revolution right now, intertwined with a global financial crisis. News and the professionals who fashion its forms and disseminations are caught up in a whirlpool of often mystifying changes. Well-known media blogger and journalist, Margaret Simons, herself wrestling with the challenges of adapting to novel demands and opportunities, tells Peter Clarke there is no turning back now to the old one-to-many model of news journalism.