From Fleet Street to Tweet Street: My Life in the News

Award winning journalist and broadcaster Steve Levinson takes you on a forty-five-year journey from the age of the hot metal linotype operator to the era of YouTube, social media and AI. His fascinating personal adventure from student newspaper to media entrepreneur follows what is regarded as the classic journalist career path – taking in provincial press, national news agency, Fleet Street daily, national TV news and on to the internet and beyond. It is a journey that offers not only a unique insight but raises important questions about how changing technology has blurred the line between real and fake news. This is a personal story containing many anecdotes alongside encounters with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, business leaders and Nobel Prize Winners. You will also meet less famous but fascinating characters including militant coal miners, eighty-year-old tea boys, and boozy journalists in backstreet pubs. So what happened to the era of scrambling to find public phone boxes, of smoke filled newsrooms, clanking typewriters, hot metal presses and cuttings libraries? Has the media world that has replaced it, the new world of mobile phones, bloggers, video journalists, internet searches, social media and AI made things better or as seems more likely, undermined the foundations of good journalism? In this book, the author shows the extent to which these changes raise the question: ‘Is Good Journalism Dead?’ Steve Levinson has been one of Britain’s leading journalists and broadcasters for almost half a century. He has worked for many of the UK’s top news organisations including the Press Association, the BBC, the Independent and Channel 4 News. He is married with two grown children and now spends his time as a media consultant and a Blue Badge guide. He is a lifelong fan of Tottenham Hotspur, an association which had a big impact on the start of his career.