George Brock is a professor and former head of the prestigious Graduate School of Journalism at City University London. During his career as a journalist, he worked for the Observer and The Times, where he was Foreign Editor, Managing Editor and Saturday Editor. He has served as president of the World Editors Forum, and is on the board of the International Press Institute. He is a regular commentator on news and journalism in the UK and global media and broadcasts frequently.

Online Resources: downloadable lecture slides

About the author
AcknowledgementsIntroduction: from ink to link01 Communicating whatever we please
Messy, unethical and opinionated origins
Select and noteworthy happenings
An explosion of opinion
Playing with fire
Bible, axe and newspapers
A brief flowering
The world's great informer
Every species of intelligence02 Furnishing the world with a new set of nerves
A great moral organ
The true Church of England
The Steam Intellect Society
We are all learning to move together
A vast agora
I order five virgins
The few dozen lines of drivel
A press typhoon
The waning power of the harlot03 The gilded age
A fluid mass
The brute force of monopoly
Sorrow, sorrow, ever more
A well-conducted press
'So will it be goodbye to Fleet Street?'
I really loathe people with power
Deregulation
Boom and decline
Owners, news and celebrity04 The engine of opportunityChain reaction
Utopia or dystopia?
What the internet does to the business of news05 Rethinking journalism again
Complexity
Frontiers fade and vanish
Ink marks on squashed trees
Comparison and choice
The downside risks of choice
Authority
Manipulation
Objectivity under strain
The advantages and drawbacks of institutions
The management of abundance
New media and change: a case study
Conclusion06 The business model crumblesOver a cliff
Print is not dead
Palliative care for print
Flipping to digital
Making people pay: walls and meters
The demand for news
What we don't know about online news07 Credibility crumblesNewsroom culture
Operation Motorman
Phone hacking
'Quality' and 'seriousness'
Trust and authority
A spell is broken08 The Leveson judgementDiagnosis
Prescription
A third way
Regulation's future
Plurality09 Throwing spaghetti at the wall
Four core tasks
We were having journalistic moments!
Error is useful10 Clues to the future
Business models
From the ashes of dead trees