Nothing straightforward
in this information age

By Jon Snow

The winners of this prize represent a Pantheon of the very best political writers of our age. I did not know David Watt, but I read him, and learned from him. I remember him as a guiding light in the autumn of the ideological age in which he died. The beauty of David's writing was precisely that it was not ideological. His was an open mind that tackled current events with an informed objectivity and freshness of approach that eludes too much that poses as journalism today.

It's incredible to think what has happened in the two decades since he died. The eventual death of ideology. The downing of the Berlin Wall, the second Russian Revolution, the freeing of Nelson Mandela together with the death of apartheid, the end of the Cold War and the birth of the war on terror. And amid it all, the dawning of the information age and the introduction of a completely new form of conversation and communication.

Newspapers have had to change, the unchallenged hegemony of television and radio is under siege. The internet is with us, and with it the liberation of both the citizenry and the media. There is the chance at last for the kinds of debates that David’s writing provoked. But now those debates are engaged worldwide, people to people.

The winners of the David Watt prize are now read worldwide in a medium not even he can have dreamt of. Ideas are moving to and fro as never before. It is disordered, chaotic, challenging, but hugely exciting. We who have come after David are blogging, emailing, vlogging, podcasting, diversifying our means of communication with our readers and viewers as never before. This is the market, a true market of ideas.

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