Positive review of my book Trust Ownership and the Future of News: Media moguls and white knights by Roger Dickinson in the February 2016 issue of the European Journal of Communication (Sage). This was his summing up:
“This is a useful book in many ways. Apart from the helpful descriptions of the crises in the news industries and the threats to journalism already mentioned, it contains very detailed accounts of the ways business models for the production of news work (or do not) to support public service journalism and, drawing on very thorough case studies of trust-owned newspapers and other trust-like forms of governance in other sectors (the BBC, the Wellcome Trust), examines the principles of trust ownership to explain why they may be our best hope of securing democratically significant journalism far into the future.
“Readers of this journal may feel the lack of an overarching sociological perspective in Ellis’ approach – a straight-ahead political economy of the news industry, say, or a Bourdieusian analysis of the shaping of the journalistic field by the fields of politics and economics – but this is not what Ellis is about. Instead, he presents a unique perspective that draws on his own considerable experience as a newspaper editor together with knowledge of recent research from the field of journalism studies. The resulting analysis is thus doubly credible. Ellis’ evaluation of the crisis in the news industry and his prescriptions for its remedy are thought-provoking and should be taken seriously.”