Week Five - Topic 1a: News on the Web

What do you think constitutes ‘news’ on the Web?

Meikle reading: paragraph 7-9

Burnett and Marshall suggest there has been “a shifted boundary of what constitutes news”, and in response to this they established the concept of “informational news” where audience members become researchers in terms of information retrieval.
I agree with their idea that (online) news has become a wide search of information by people who use the web. When searching for a particular story, different sources are used rather than relying on the first one they happen to come across. I think that this is largely to do with the idea of ‘produsage’, people are aware that anybody can post their thoughts onto the web and dress their opinion up as ‘news’. Using a few reliable sources confirms the truth in the story.
I think that as the web is so full of people’s opinions, gossip and conspiracy theories, often ‘news’ is not very insightful. Therefore a lot of people will rely on professional media companies to provide honest, trustworthy news. I think that the information provided by reliable, professional sources is what constitutes news on the web. As there is an information overload, not all of the sources can be relied on; people’s opinions don’t form news: truthful information about recent developments, happenings or events is what does.