“gazing wistfully in the rear-view mirror and shaking a fist at passing traffic.”

In the Sunday Times Liam Fay takes issue with a recent speech by Emily O’Reilly, Ireland’s Ombudsman and Information Commissioner, when addressing journalism students at the University of Limerick. From the Sunday Times

O’Reilly’s speech was simultaneously over-pessimistic about the future and over-sentimental about the past. Literally and figuratively, journalism has always been a race against time, so penning the profession’s obituary is premature in an age when the opportunities generated by technology change by the week.

New media create new problems, but the general trend is positive. Apart from anything else, increased diversification of the means through which knowledge and opinion are circulated provides a needed counterweight to the writing or rewriting of history by anointed grandees.

The beauty of the information superhighway is that it can accommodate everybody, even those who are parked in a lay-by, gazing wistfully in the rear-view mirror and shaking a fist at passing traffic.

Pete Baker