Flickr/ European Parliament.Some rights reserved.If you'd asked me a few years ago how to democratise the media, I'd have given a different response. I'd probably have spoken about anti-monopoly laws. I'd have weighed up things like David Leigh's proposal for a £2 levy on broadband connections to pay for investigative journalism. I'd have pointed you to ideas-machine Dan Hind and his proposals for the future of the BBC.
So when Josef from the Media Reform Coalition asked me to write something on the subject ahead of their upcoming conference, I was rather surprised that the first place my mind leapt to wasn't any of those things. It's not that they aren't important. They are. Ultimately, the agencies and powers of the state are still vital in all of this, and shouldn't be ignored. But now, I'd say something else too.
I'm Scottish. I moved to Oxford in 2009, but still go back fairly regularly. And over that period, I've seen a country utterly transformed. The trigger, of course, was the referendum. But I'm not entirely sure that the undercurrents are hugely different in the rest of what for now remains the UK. If you gave people in most parts of the country two years to consider if they could do a better job of running themselves than Westminster, I suspect many would conclude that they could.
