Henk Blanken (Rotterdam, 1959) is a journalist and writer. He published three books about new media, the culture of the Internet and the ethics of journalism. Basic idea: digital technology caused a clash between old media and new media, fueled by a fundamental gap in media consumption between generations. The business model of traditional media is dying, slowly but inevitably, and as a consequence journalism is at risk.

As a reporter Henk Blanken, who started his career in 1980 with Het Vrije Volk, worked for sixteen years at the leading Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. Since 2003 he was a deputy editor-in-chief at Dagblad van het Noorden, one of the largest regional dailies in the Netherlands. Recently he picked up writing again as an investigative journalist.

In his two most recent publications (PopUp, 2007, with media scolar Mark Deuze, and Mediamores, 2009) he argues that journalism has no choice but to try to understand the values and ethics of the network society. What is truth in times of information overload, or is this overload a mythe created by oldfashioned media that simply don’t understand how young people deal with news on the Internet?

Henk Blanken is a member of the Dutch Press Council. Over the last years he spoke about new media and digital culture at conferences in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Danmark, Sweden, Germany, Egypt and the US. Recently he acted as a consultant on new media ethics for the Press Council in Georgia.