I must begin this posting with a big declaration of interest. I teach at City University London and I'm about to discuss books written by colleagues, including my head of department. But all deserve to be read, so I'm delighted to mention them.

Out of print: newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age* is by George Brock, former executive with The Times who has been head of journalism at City since 2009.

I galloped through this book a couple of weeks ago. Its greatest virtue, by far, is in seeing the changes in journalism throughout history as a ceaseless process.

Brock refuses to fall into the trap of technological determinism. He accepts that technological developments lead to change but rightly understands that, even between the inventions which have influenced how news is gathered and transmitted, journalism has always been in a state of flux.

That said, he does believe the digital revolution that we are living through now is a time of transformative change. The disruption also happens to have occurred against a background of economic recession in a period when, even before the rise of the internet, newspaper sales were in decline.

For several years, we have come to call this "a perfect storm". Brock seizes on this as an opportunity, rather than a threat. In asserting the need for journalism to be rethought in order to meet the needs of changed conditions, he argues that the storm is heralding a new era.

There will be casualties, of course. He grasps that the wind is blowing a hole through the long-run industrial structure of the news business. Big media, mainstream media, is losing its dominance.

The net offers everyone the chance to engage in the activity known as journalism. Most importantly, it allows them to choose what to read and what to say about it. Journalism is more of a conversation and less of a lecture.

Digital technology does not eradicate the need for a professional form of journalism, however. But journalists, as they select and curate and stimulate, have to work within a changed environment.

For all journalists - veterans such as Brock (and me), as well as the students we are teaching - it is a time of experimentation. The best of the old must be melded with the new.

Similarly, building a business model in order to sustain and nourish journalism is essential to the future. In Brock's words, "the future business of journalism will resemble the past and will also be unlike it."

Brock's chapter about the importance of experimentation is titled "Throwing spaghetti at the wall." You keep tossing the pasta at the wall to see which bits stick.

Most of it won't stick, which is why so many traditional publishers have been loath to do it. Spending on innovations that might not work out is not cost-effective.

Instead, those willing to use up lots of spaghetti have shown signs of success, as Brock - in positive mode throughout the book - argues.

He doubts that there will be a repeat of the 20th century, when a single business model (built on advertising revenue) underpinned journalism.

Instead, in his final chapter, he outlines a range of other possibilities, including subscription (aka paywalls), philanthropy, sponsorship, public or government subsidy and a mix of all of those. (He doesn't mention crowd-funding but it is implicit in his overview).

The journalists who, by accident or design, step over the mark

George Brock deals with the Leveson report, but it doesn't cast a long shadow over his central thesis. By contrast, the reason for Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry, namely phone hacking, is the touchstone for the book by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert.

In When Reporters cross the line: the heroes, the villains, the hackers and the spies*, they leave the hacking scandal to the final chapter. But it is the major subject of their conclusion and forms the backbone to the book.

The previous 13 chapters amount to a reconsideration of case histories in which journalists have faced (or ignored) a variety of ethical dilemmas.

They go back to Norman Ewer, a Daily Herald reporter who spied for the Soviet Union, Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who acted as a propagandist for the Soviet Union and Guy Burgess, one-time BBC producer, who was also a Soviet spy.

There are excellent chapters on Martin Bell, the BBC reporter who called for a journalism of attachment after his experiences in Bosnia, and on Sandy Gall, the ITN correspondent whose reporting of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s was said to be biased (Purvis and Hulbert disagree).

Another case history, about the Bosnian conflict, was particularly embarrassing for me to read. It concerned the reporting of the camp known as Omarska where Serbs were holding Muslim detainees.

ITN broadcast footage in August 1992 of a prisoner, Fikret Alic, standing behind barbed wire. He was emaciated and hollow-eyed. The obvious implication was that the Serbs were running a concentration camp.

A couple of years later an article in the now-defunct magazine, Living Marxism, claimed that the journalists had misrepresented the image: it was they who were behind the wire rather than Alic.

This story, which implied that ITN had been guilty of duplicity, got "legs." It began to attract journalistic and political sympathy. So, in 1997, ITN sued Living Marxism (LM) for defamation.

Here comes the bit that still gives me a red face. I agreed to give evidence for the magazine, not because I thought it was correct in its assertions, but because I do not believe media organisations (or journalists) should use the libel law.

My siding with LM earned me a rebuke from a Guardian colleague, Ed Vulliamy, who had witnessed the awful reality of the camp and later gave evidence about it at The Hague war crimes tribunal.

I stood by the supposed subtlety of my position but, as Purvis and Hulbert illustrate, there was good reason for ITN's legal action. It was the only way to prevent lies being spread about their journalism as the LM allegations gained credibility.

Indeed, until I read the chapter, I didn't realise just how much traction the false LM story gained at the time. I hereby apologise to ITN's reporters and Vulliamy for having offered to help LM. There are rare occasions, such as this, when a libel action is the only way to deal with a false story that has the potential to ruin reputations.

Another chapter is fascinating for a different reason. It is about the so-called Silent Men of Fleet Street - Brendan Mulholland and Reg Foster.

They were jailed in 1963 for contempt of court for refusing to name their sources for stories published in their papers, the Daily Mail and Daily Sketch respectively, about the Vassall spy case.

It was later claimed that the pair couldn't name their sources because there were none: they had invented their stories. I interviewed Foster not long before he died in 1999 (aged 95) and he maintained that his story was true and properly sourced, as you would expect.

Matthew Engel, writing after Foster's death in The Guardian, was diplomatic. Foster "may have had a genuine scoop, or may just have used his freedom of expression. I think we had better leave it like that." So we will.

It's 2013 and the sexist stereotyping remains in place

The glass ceiling remains in place for female journalists. Or perhaps I should say, it appeared to have been cracked, and even smashed for a while, and then got reglazed.

That's one of the findings by Suzanne Franks in her detailed and readable study, Women and journalism*, on behalf of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

"Even in a transformed digital environment there remain patterns of gendered employment and attitudes which have proved intractable and immune to change," she writes.

For example, in the early 1990s there were three female national newspaper editors. Currently, there are two.

She concedes that the picture is mixed. For example, the senior executive team at the London Evening Standard, edited by Sarah Sands, has more women than men.

But the evidence she mounts, illustrating the slow progress of women within journalism, is compelling. More women than men train as journalists (as our university intake illustrates).

More and more women also get starts at newspapers. But the depressing truth is that the executive echelon tends to be dominated by men.

She also looks at the pay gap between the sexes, discovering that men earn more. That, it transpires, is a problem shared with other countries. She cites a 2012 study by the International Federation of Journalists study which compared journalists' salaries in 16 countries.

She writes: "In every case there was a gender pay gap but it showed big variations between areas. Europe had the highest salary levels but also some of the greatest disparities in gender pay."

Then there is the age-old prejudice about there being jobs for men and jobs for women. Hard news for men; celebrity and lifestyle for women.

I was genuinely surprised by her finding that there is a gender imbalance in political reporting. But the figures she mentions - shown in detail in the appendices - do bear it out. She points to the Daily Mail and The Independent where "the overwhelming number of stories about politics" are "reported by men."

There are areas where women have succeeded, such as business journalism. And there is no doubt that women correspondents have played a leading role in war reporting. That is a great advance.

But traditional, print-based mainstream media is breaking down (as Brock writes, see above). So what of the digital present and future? Does that provide opportunities for women? Franks writes:

"The limitations upon women's progress into journalism and as media decision makers are most apparent in the more traditional spheres. Where the styles of production and the approach to content are least changed then women have in general been less able to make an impact. But when they have carved out new niches either in the way media is disseminated or in expanding the agenda, then overall they have had the most success."

Clearly hinting at a study to come, she argues that "it would be useful to pursue research on the way that female entrepreneurs are exploiting the digital revolution, without the constraints of traditional media experience in the newsroom and the wider workplace."

And Franks has another book on the way...

I have yet to read Franks's forthcoming book, Reporting Disasters: famine, aid, politics and the media*, which is due to be published next month.

But the BBC's David Loyn obviously has seen it. He writes: "This is the best kind of history — one that challenges stereotypes and asks uncomfortable questions."

And Leigh Daynes, executive director of Médecins du Monde in the UK, offers praise too. He says her "sweeping narrative offers an unprecedented, detailed insight into events which were to define a generation's view of Africa in the wake of Michael Buerk's iconic 1984 television news report about the Ethiopian famine."

*Out of print: newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age by George Brock (Kogan Page); When reporters cross the line: the heroes, the villains, the hackers and the spies by Stewart Purvis & Jeff Hulbert (Biteback Publishing); Women and journalism by Suzanne Franks (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and IB Tauris); Reporting Disasters: famine, aid, politics and the media by Suzanne Franks (Hurst)