Economist editor on the future of journalism

Economist editor John Micklethwait spoke in San Francisco Tuesday on the future of media, and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Dan Fost was there to write about it for the Tech Chronicles blog.

Fost wrote, “Micklethwait presided over a lunch at the Slanted Door in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, mostly to get the Economist on the radar of Bay Area media, and to stimulate a discussion of where the media is heading. (The Economist will soon start a Bay Area media blitz to boost its circulation.)

“In studying the landscape a year ago, Micklethwait said he thought ‘a hurricane was heading our way,’ destroying advertising-supported business models from print to broadcast. But today, he said, ‘it doesn’t seem so bad.’

“Yet once we all got talking, we realized no one had precisely figured out where our business models were heading. The Economist keeps adding new blogs to its Web site, and Micklethwait believes they will supplement its model of in-depth analysis and reportage of international news.

“That model is encouraging, although it’s supported by a financial structure that is certainly rare. The Economist is run by a trust, virtually independent of its owners, Micklethwait said. So it has to make money, but it is under none of the sort of pressure that publicly traded U.S. media companies labor under.”

Read more here, including an interesting observation as to why there were no bloggers in attendance.