After the phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World, it’s time that the press asks itself how news is made and circulates in the era of the internet. This is exactly what The Economist investigated this week in a special report.

Today everybody can be a journalist. By using websites such as YouTube and social networks like Twitter and Facebook people share information in real time.

However, the situation changes outside the West. Can you believe that Facebook, loved by Westeners, is very rare in Japan, South Africa, Brazil and India? In China, where all news is screened before it reaches the public, it is completely blacked out. Instead the Chinese use Renren.com, 17 million Japanese access Mixi from their mobiles, South Africans have MXit and Brazilians and Indians like Google’s Orkut. In the meantime, in these countries the circulation of paid-for daily newspapers is increasing, contrary to Europe and the US.

We can say that a more participatory and social news environment is on the whole a good thing, but we are in a way overwhelmed by information; the transparency of sources nowadays may therefore count more than objectivity. This is probably the reason why Fox News, a conservative American cable-news channel famous for being opinionated, makes more profits than its less strident rivals, CNN and MSNBC, combined.

To sum up, we can say the current news environment is closer to the coffee houses and the conversational culture of the era before mass media and we can enjoy it, but we have to pay attention to the reliability of the information we are exposed to.

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