The world of the media is changing as fast as everything else. A politician makes a speech ignored by the conventional media and it gets 1 million hits on utube. The world of Blogs forces a resignation of a chief government adviser before the daily newspapers know what is going on! The new social media is challenging the conventional news elites as never before. Politicians and their established lobbies are running scared. The new social media has blown a hole through the existing elites. What does this mean for the future? Speakers include,

Daniel Hannan is an MEP and became famous overnight. As he says – “The internet has changed politics - changed it utterly and forever ……I made a three-minute speech in the European Parliament, aimed at Gordon Brown. I tipped off the BBC and some of the newspaper correspondents but, unsurprisingly, they ignored me: I am, after all, simply a backbench MEP. When I woke up (the following) morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.” Currently it has over 2.2 million hits. Is this the shape of politics and the media in this century?

Carol Haslam has had a long history in broadcasting. Joining the BBC Open University in the early 1970’s she went on to be the first Commissioning Editor for Education in Channel 4 and then to become the Director of Programmes for Superchannel. She later became a freelance producer and was also Executive Producer of the popular BBC programme Ground Force. She is a Trustee of both the Wildscreen Festival and the One World Broadcasting Trust.

Professor Barrie Axford is the author of the book “New Media and Politics” which makes a successful attempt to map the potentially transformative effects of new media on various aspects of political institutions and culture, both at a theoretical and empirical level. He is Professor of Politics and Head of the Department of International Relations Politics and Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. He is interested in the extent to which commercial populism now dominates electoral and other political discourses; the ways in which the functions of leadership, government and political parties are modified by different forms of both old and new media and the democratic or undemocratic import of such changes.

Sunny Hundal is editor of Liberal Conspiracy an influential and growing Blog. He is also involved with Pickled politics - a current affairs magazine / group blog with the primary focus on British politics, current affairs, media and society. He is also editor of the online magazine Asians in Media and founder of the thinktank New Generation Network. He has a degree in Economics from Brunel University and has written articles for leading British newspapers including The Financial Times and The Independent.

This meetup is being held in conjunction with the London Bridge Festival.

Thanks to MWB Business Exchange for the use of their conference facilities.