My internet days started early, when the internet was still being dubbed the “information superhighway”. I’d bought a book, “The Complete Idiots Guide to the Internet” and read through that, and then decided to sign up to Compuserve. We were on there for a good few months, and then Mosaic appeared as the first real web browser, so we decided to sign up with Demon. We were on there until broadband came along.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In 1994, there was a collision of a comet with the big planet Jupiter. As we had access to some Nasa e-mails at the time (one of the first mass-mailing facilities available), they sned pictures of the impact. Quite low-res, but they were something similar to this.
It caused quite a stir around, showing them to people, because the papers hadn’t published them yet, and wouldn’t do so for the next day or so. Those days, the papers were playing catch-up, as news travelled a bit slowly than it does now.
The point I’m making, what with the hoohaa about a certain footballer…celebrity…sportsman, is that news travels faster than ever, especially if you throw Twitter into the equation. But you just have to question, where do the papers stop reporting the news and start making the news. I know it’s known as the “evil paper”, the Daily Telegraph fell into the same trap when they bugged Vince Cable a few months back. They were making the news, rather than reporting it. I bet they lost quite a lot of readers based on that escapade (including this household).
Wouldn’t this imply that there is no news out there worth reporting on it’s own merits. They’ve lost the meaning of the distinction between news being “in the public interest” (i.e. expenses scandal) and “of public interest”. What an individual does in their private life is of no concern of mine, unless they’re breaking the law.
But if it was like that, no newspapers would be sold, would there?
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