Open Source Article

Newspapers haven’t been killed off by the Internet (at least, not yet!). The reason for this is that when we buy a newspaper, we’re not buying the news. These days the news is free (gratis) – we can go online and read newsfeeds from organisations like Reuters or the Associated Press, or original reporting from an organisation like the BBC. When I buy a newspaper like ‘USA Today’ or ‘The Independent’, I am actually buying an editorial style. The editor-in-chief for the newspaper sets the outlook, and then the editors and other staff select the news stories, phrase the reports, position them in the publication and perform the lay-out in support of that editorial outlook. If I go online to get the news, I have to do the work of selecting and filtering the news, and I may not always be aware of the biases of the source I am using. To get an aggregation of the news I want delivered in a style that helps me and with biases I understand, I subscribe to a newspaper.

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