Evaluating News in the Internet Age: Key Observations on Quality of Content

Abstract

It is trite to assert that the Internet has democratized media and communication, and is shoring up the volume of practitioners in the media and communications field. With growing online facilities for information dissemination, interaction, networking and knowledge sharing, there has been a corresponding, or even greater increase in the population of those managing these information. The result is the gradual lowering of the traditional or extant rules for the evaluation of what is news as previously known to the traditional media. This paper, therefore, attempts some key observations of emerging trends in the new definition of news in the online age, and some of the factors that are played up in the evaluation of news amongst traditional practioners in the media and communications field, in the midst of the burgeoning list of information senders, sharers, receivers, persons-in-interaction, as triggered by the growing sophistication in technologies of communication, where the simple possession of an average hand-held device could make the bearer a practitioner.