Me, Myself and I

'My Telegraph’; part of the Telegraph website exemplifies perfectly the new wave in modern journalism. It’s a portal which is completely adaptable to an individual’s interests and tastes. No two ‘my telegraph’ sites are the same. This is the way news seems to be moving in the present day. With RSS feeds dropping personalised news straight to your desktop, users can get their news that they want, when it happens. As great as this sounds, it’s also, a little worrying. If individuals are allowed to decide what new they want, or think they want, there’s a very real danger that they’ll be missing out on much of the information, that they really need. This is a particular worry, I think with RSS feeds; selecting just certain types of news for example just education, health or sport, then many people really are not consuming as much news as they should.


I certainly don’t think that we need to go back to the ‘good old days’ of journalism with the journalist being the all seeing, all knowing dictator. But surely there must be a limit to how much news consumers can control what they want to know.


Shane Richmond from The Telegraph made some excellent points about online journalism, particularly in regards to legal worries. It’s a known fact by now that anyone can publish information on the internet, so for high profile court cases, such as the case of ‘Baby P’, it’s difficult to moderate what people put on the internet and Shane pointed out that the law is going to have to change to keep up with the massive expansion of the internet. The web is a global medium, not bound just by U.K. jurisdiction and successfully moderating content is almost impossible. The ‘don’t read it all’ attitude to blogs and comments is certainly not something I completely agree with or comfortable with, if users are going to be given the freedom to say what they want, we still need responsible journalists to moderate this effectively to protect individuals. But it’s a great and exciting time for newspaper journalists – being given the freedom to really engage with what your readers think is what journalists should be doing.