Incidentally, we had a guest speaker come to work today. John Silvester, much respected crime reporter for The Age and author of Underbelly: The Gangland Wars gave us some sound advice: “No matter what happens, it’s the quality of journalism that counts.”

So from Australia we have the above story sounding like the far-off ringing of funeral bells. With the right kind of ears you can hear the nails being hammered into print journalism’s coffin. Compare this with the rise and rise of South korea’s Ohmynews, who are not just adapting to, but dictating trends in online news. Hard to believe when you consider the Korean War of the early 50’s. Infrastructure in the country was destroyed and an economy was virtually non-existent throughout the 60’s. The Koreans proved industrious though and slowly built a stable and profitable economy. Heavy censorship of South Korean media in the 80’s led to widespread condemnation and resulted in heavy liberalisation of the media in the late 80’s.

What I found most interesting in the reading this week, is the side-comment that legislation prevents Koreans from owning both a newspaper and a TV station. There’ll be no News Ltd or Fairfax duopoly in South Korea, thank you very much. They prefer to let the people do the reporting, and who could argue with that. It means no marketers, managers and faceless CEO’s wielding overwritten emails about “a period of centralisation of business support services” (read: over the next few weeks some of you will be sacked) and means free and unfetted journalism.

It’s not all roses though. Sure, the idea of anyone being able to report the news is irresistibly democratic and free-spirited, but where is the integrity we are guaranteed from a legitimate publication bound by journalistic ethics?

Ohmy I have so much more to say…

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