Changing the Channel

The future of “news” in the 21st century—how we consume it and how we produce it—is heading into exciting but entirely uncharted territory. The explosion of new technology and the growth of social media are gradually rewriting the rules. As a consequence, the public is edging ever closer to the centre of the process, and the implications of this are potentially profound.

I learned this with great clarity when I worked in the tiny desert kingdom of Qatar, overlooking the Persian Gulf. It is there where the influential Al Jazeera international news network is headquartered, and it was Al Jazeera—during the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2009 and the subsequent Arab Spring revolutions that began in Tunisia in December 2010—that most dramatically tapped into the public’s yearning throughout the Arab world to write its own history. For the first time, the Arab public finally made some...