Shock of the News

As Rupert Murdoch's tech advisor and founder of the leading communications journal in the US, Jonathan Miller rode the exhilarating first technology wave of the news with satellite TV that made Murdoch the Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg of his day. But he was also the founder of Britain's first news website, Camden Lock, and was a first-hand witness how Murdoch lost the internet revolution by being unfocused and misunderstanding the nature of the news.

Concerned about the AI revolution and control passing entirely from the journalists to engineers, Jonathan wrote this passionate plea about the function of the news machine and how its important function to shock is being squandered in a catch-up chase for traffic by old media companies. There is still time to pull it back if only we understand why news can neither be replaced by AI and what we need to do.

The young Jonathan Miller had an innate talent to annoy authority as a pupil at Bedales school. When he discovered that the news can be like a hand grenade, he had found his calling. pursuit of creating a stir, he ended up in many different places, from Rupert Murdoch's tech adviser and disruptor-in-chief, to war reporting in Kosovo, the UK's first news site, Piers Morgan's Uncensored and bare-knuckle reporting on the follies of rural Britain.

These spiky confessions trace through the Murdoch empire's secrets, the tech revolution that preceded the web, Bart Simpson, Margaret Thatcher, the doomed fate of wokeness, and trouble in an era flattened by AI. Tech and the media world will never look the same...