It will be new but will it be accurate?

According to the Australian Oxford Dictionary, 'news' is n. information about recent events.

When I began studying journalism last year, the first thing I learnt about news is that it should be new, interesting, important and informative.

News reporting should be fair, accurate and relevant and it should be properly attributed.

I'm not that old but I'm old enough to remember that, growing up in Melbourne in the 1970s and '80s, we received our news on the family's black & white television (for a while) and by reading the daily newspapers.

My Dad would buy The Sun in the morning and The Herald in the evening.

The Age was the broadsheet which is still in circulation and which also has an online presence today.

In 1990, cost-cutting saw The Herald and The Sun merged to become The Herald-Sun, a sign of things to come.

Since the 1990s, the rise of 'new media' and a fall in newspapers' share of advertising revenue has seen more mergers and closures in the print media.

While I consider myself to be technologically savvy, I like newspapers.  I like their tactility.  Even iPads can't give you that old-fashioned sense of touch.

The cyber-world of online journalism offers many advantages over its real-world elder.

As well as opening up the world of news reporting (good, bad, ugly and otherwise) to anyone and everyone, online journalism offers, more effectively than ever before, the 'new' in news.  In other words, immediacy.

But, as recent examples of online reporting show, immediacy can be at the expense of core news values such as accuracy, fairness and attribution.

Recently, a number of reputable media 'establishments' (not the amateur hacks) were quick to jump to conclusions about the circumstances surrounding the tragic bombing and shootings by a lone assassin in Norway.

I'm no fan of al-Qaida, but I don't think the shootings being attributed to the terrorist group in the first round of reporting was right, particularly when it wasn't right.  It was factually incorrect.

Eager to get the story out, journalists and their employers, were quick to jump to conclusions about al-Qaida or a related terrorist organisation being behind the 'attacks'.

Reports I have read do suggest that the journalists were reporting what was being speculated at the time by various terrorism experts.

Nevertheless, the fact that this wasn't the case has caused the very nature of such hasty and inaccurate reporting to become another story in itself.

That's not a good look for the journalism profession.

But that's more a criticism of journalists themselves than technology.

The internet offers immediacy of news to an information-hungry audience.

But it may just take time for journalists and news organisations to adapt to and understand the power and impact of new and evolving technologies to ensure that the facts are published in a timely and considered fashion.

Personally, I have embraced the world of online news.  The number of news apps on my iPhone is testament to that.

But I'm always wary of the accuracy of news just in and, perhaps showing my age, I still like the feel and the smell of a big fat newspaper to enjoy with my coffee on a Saturday morning.