Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is just public relations. -George Orwell

I’m increasingly worried that online versions of newspapers and more television channels, while providing more information, will in fact make the general population less informed. To paraphrase George, is news meant to be more than what we want to know about?

When one buys a newspaper, the editorial team has accrued information, decided on the most important stories and allocated space accordingly*. By turning the physical pages of the paper one still sees the other news stories headlines and photos, and attention may be drawn to other news items.

*[Granted there is incredible room for bias and corporate interest, but that is another post!]

When one visits a newspaper website, this same phenomenon occurs to an extent, but the visual representation of each story is smaller, and there is less chance of reading a story that does not pique one’s interest from its headline. I’m happy for people to disagree here, but see if you notice sensational headlines for stories that aren’t as full of sex and scandal as you might think!

I would argue that where a newspaper has finite physical space, the relative value or worth of a news item is partially communicated through its ‘footprint’ on the page. By contrast, web space is infinite and even the most trivial news items are given equal space on their own page. Online we are able to directly search and read the news we seek out, rather than finding it amongst other news we browse, and may benefit from knowing.

With television news, I was personally guilty – as a 90’s youngster- of trying to get the family to watch the 5 o’clock news on Channel 10 so that at six while other channels’ news was on there was a better chance of watching The Simpsons! Today most families have multiple televisions, computers, tablets, phones etc. and everyone can watch what they want, when they want. Should we just watch what we want, though?

Picking our own web news articles and the provision of secondary channels such as Go!, 7mate, 11 etc allow us to remain blissfully unaware of news we probably should know.

One could argue 24 hour news channels fill the gap, but repetitive, tweet version CNN style reporting [again, another post!] has its own issues.

Fragmentation of media and the internet bring many positives for information sharing, but my question is, how do we ensure that once in a while people find something they’re not looking for?