The bitter old guard say this is the very thing that is destroying journalism and that real ‘in the field’ reporting is now dead and gone.

I don’t know about that, but I know that my work colleagues and I do 95% of our interviews over the phone and the majority of our research begins and ends with Google.

I don’t have the time or the word count to debate whether this is good or bad journalism, but I know it makes my job a hell of a lot easier and for this I am grateful.

But the internet has already progressed far beyond Google and we now have even more sophisticated tools at our disposal.

Here are some of them in easy to read point form. Click on each for a more detailed explanation than I have the room for:

* RSS or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ – Trawls the net for your favourite content and feeds it to your hungry RSS reader.
* Technorati – The Google of the blog world. Here’s an edublogger post with a good overview of Technorati.
* Moblogs – Not hip hop slang for more blogs, but actually geek slang for mobile phone blogs.
* Podcasts – Do I really need to explain?
* Vlogs – A blog… on video
* Twitter – What are you doing?
* Del.icio.us – The humble bookmark has evolved.

Just for fun, here is a twit’s guide to Twitter:

My generation, the dreaded Gen-Y, are constantly accused of ‘wanting it all and wanting it now’. In a soulless rush for instant gratification, we shun literature, academic texts, newspapers, even road signs. Hell, anything that takes more than 30 seconds of concentration just isn’t on our radar. We don’t even have respect for the English language. Instead, we replace it with ‘txtspeak’. It saves valuable time when we’re breaking our thumbs trying to txt frantic msgs 2 our m8s u c?

In all seriousness though, now more than ever, time is money. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just can’t imagine having the luxury of sitting down and reading my favourite newspaper everyday. In fact, when I think about it, I hate newspapers, in the traditional paper format anyway.

Here’s how I get my news on a normal working day:

I shoot a quick glance at the headline of someone else’s newspaper on the train.

I get to work, bring up Google News and see what interest me. The best thing about Google is that I can see what’s happening and then choose which newspaper’s version I want to read. I’m not confined to just one paper’s version.

If I’ve got the time, I prefer to read features rather than front-page news, so i pop on over to Arts and Letters Daily. A&L conveniently source all the worthy features from newspapers all around the globe and put them all together so I can point-and-click as I choose.

After that I check my RSS feed from Metacritic which does a smiliar thing as A&L -gathering music, film, video game and TV reviews from media all over the globe and bringing them together on the one page.

Astute readers will notice a pattern here. I like my news and information condensed, or i guess you could say ‘converged’. I don’t necessarily read less than the broadsheet-brethren, I just want my information presented to me in an easily digestible format that I can customise to suit my needs.

Basically, I don’t want to read my news in a format that requires arms the size of Mr Tickle to read.

Mr Tickle: Avid reader of The Age