Rozina Sabur from the University of Warwick’s The Boar speaks with arts and culture writer Lyn Gardner about the ever-changing face of journalism:

Lyn Gardner, a regular theatregoer all her life, has been a critic at the Guardian for their ‘Culture’ section since 1996. Before that she wrote for The Independent. After graduating in Drama and English from Kent University she began her career in journalism. She was a founding member of listings magazine City Limits, the largest co-op in Europe.

As a journalist who has experienced first hand the changes that have been affected by new modes of media, what do you make of the current media climate and its future?

I think print journalism is changing because of the huge cultural shifts that are taking place because of technological advances. It’s just that we had one model for a very long time and now we are shifting to another and we don’t know exactly what it is and how it may look in the end. It’s a challenge – but not a catastrophe by any means. Look at the invention of the printing press, which was really bad for monks who painted manuscripts, but fantastic for reading. What’s going on with the web at the moment might not be good for print, newspapers, but it’s fantastic for journalism.

Presumably because more journalists can have a platform on the internet? 

Of course, you can have a plurality of voices in way that simply wasn’t possible before. It opens up, as the Guardian has done, the possibility that you can have a real dialogue with your readers. In the past, if someone wanted to communicate with me they would probably have to send me a letter to the Guardian address. And then I would have to write one back – very difficult. One of the other things that you see very much with the Guardian is the idea of the ‘citizen journalist’, there are people there on the ground who absolutely know their local community and what is going on. That is a much better way to get information than sending a journalist from outside. The problem, of course, is ideally providing a model that still allows journalists to be paid…

Full story here.