Recently I decided to subscribe to The Age website. I still haven’t been able to because there’s some glitch on the website that calls an error every time it tries to connect with PayPal. So I complained and whinged and ranted about it a bit on Facebook and Twitter. And people reply, incredulous that I am stupid enough to pay for what I can supposedly just get free from other sources. Many, leading by example, have said the exact same thing: “the Internet is my news feed.”
I agree. The Internet is my news feed too. I have RSS feeds. I follow journos on Twitter. Many of my facebook friends and the people I follow on Twitter and app.net post news and analysis of interest to me. I read the ABC news website. And I read The Age. It’s a part of my whole mosaic of news. And when I tried leaving it out I quickly discovered that it fills a gap that nothing else does.
For all that’s wrong with mainstream media (and there’s a lot), it still does some things very well, including investigative journalism, good analysis of local and national issues, and informative local news. And that’s a reason also for paying for it, because that stuff costs money (which is probably why I’m not getting so much of it from the free news sources).
So yes, the Internet is my news feed too. And I pull all the different bits in that suit my needs. And if none of us pay for the stuff that’s deeper than “this thing just happened”, then eventually it will disappear and we can tick another box on the long list of things that George Orwell thought he saw growing in the debris from the wars of the first half of the 20th century.