Overload!

“The tragedy of the news media in the infor­ma­tion age is that in their strug­gle to find a finan­cial foothold,” writes Bree Nor­den­son, “they have neglected to look hard enough at the larger impli­ca­tions of the new infor­ma­tion land­scape — and more gen­er­ally, of mod­ern life.” That is, infor­ma­tion over­load. Most of us lack the skills — not to men­tion the time, atten­tion, and moti­va­tion — to make sense of today’s unre­lent­ing tor­rent of infor­ma­tion. Far from pre­cip­i­tat­ing the demise of jour­nal­ists and news orga­ni­za­tions, it spells out why jour­nal­ism won’t dis­ap­pear. Paul Duguid explains: “[Infor­ma­tion] needs a rec­om­men­da­tion, a seal of approval, some­thing that says this is reli­able or true or what­ever. And so jour­nal­ists, but also the insti­tu­tions of jour­nal­ism as one aspect of this, become very important.”