Patrick Smith's Best of 2008

Patrick Smith of paidContent picks his best of 2008.

Best old/trad media of the year: An obvious choice perhaps: The Economist. It's a rare print success and required reading, in print, for thousands around the world plus it's been really influential on all kinds of news media. I'm also a huge fan of Fighting Talk on Five Live on Saturday mornings, a very silly knock-about sports gameshow made by real journalists without any of the usual BBC stiff-upper-lip approach to radio. Richard Edwards at the Yorkshire Evening Post deserves a mention for making good use of his local knowledge in the Karen Matthews case with some great reporting.

Best new media: paidContent! But aside from that the BBC's iPlayer has been a real success story and is changing the way we watch telly. The technology now looks like it'll be made available to commercial media too.

Best story of the year: I know a lot of Brits were turned off by it, but it was definitely Obama for me. I'm going for optimism over The Crunch, which is hardly over as a story, but Robert Peston must be the journo of the year for his long list of scoops, Northern Rock's bail-out being just one of them.

Prediction for 2009: I hate to be downbeat, but for newspapers, it's going to be a hard year: more redundancies, more closures, more consolidation. On the upside, there is a lot of opportunity for journalists to think like entrepreneurs and start their own businesses.

Tomorrow: Ruth Addicott, ex-editor of the Woman section on The Argus, Brighton, gives a seagull's eye view of the best of the media from the south coast.

Rest of the Best of, so far: Paul Linford, Adrian Monck , Grey Cardigan , Jean Morgan, Steve Busfield, Neil Fowler, Ian Reeves, Dominic Ponsford, Michael Crozier, Judith Townend and Laura Oliver.