David Zeeck of the Poynter Institute notes that he used to conflate newspapers and news, but that now he realizes that

“News is the ultimate manifestation of a human desire to know what’s going on, to make sense of the world, to catch up on the latest. It can be a letter from home, gossip at the water cooler, or a phone call from a friend you haven’t heard from in a while. It’s a stock pick or a wanted poster. Sometimes news comes dressed as entertainment — as in movie reviews and baseball scores.

News is information I need. It’s intelligence that gives me an edge on the competition. It’s knowledge to help me prepare for the worst. It’s facts that set me straight, trends that show me where things are headed, predictions that may (or may not) come true. It’s wisdom that helps me live better.

News isn’t, strictly speaking, a newspaper. Or a television broadcast. It isn’t an Internet site or a podcast.

Those are forms. They’re just various means of conveyance.”

This discussion of news as a concept freed from its medium isn’t difficult to swallow by any means. Journalism school, however, will also teach you that the news is objective, sterile, unbiased, fair, balanced, factual, and accurate. These ideas are refuted by Howard Owens, who argues that:

“For thousands of years, news was reported in a personal fashion — via campfire or troubadour. The printing press enabled the rise of mass media and process of reporting news from one to many. The Internet enables a return to one-to-one, personal journalism. We can now report news in the same way we did when it was over a campfire —complete with nuance, context and personal insight.

Mass media needed “objective journalism” because news was reported one to many, so it had to be generic and meet the needs of a highly differentiated audience.

Today, all news is one-to-one. It can be personal, because if you or I disagree with that personal POV, we have the means to respond, question, and provide our own facts or commentary.

Modern news will win/succeed because it returns us to our roots, our DNA, our way of being — the way we most naturally like to communicate —in a personal voice.”

I do personally take issue with this definition; yes, we are more easily interested in personal news and communications – why else would Facebook be more successful than Google News? However, personal news isn’t enough to prepare us to make decisions as members of a democratic society. There are larger events, issues, and discussions in which we must take part in order to move foward in a modern and interconnected world. We need objective journalism not because it is generic, but because it offers a base from which we can analyze and understand the world around us. Furthermore, we need a way in which to expand, discuss, and share these objective stories. We can communicate nuanced and contextualized stories, but only if we have a base of facts and knowledge that we trust.

So, news is certainly the stuff of what’s important, what’s timely, what’s relevant. It will be both communal and personal, democratic and ideological. Perhaps the question to ask is not how the idea of news has changed, but how our roles as journalists and readers have changed. News will always be news, but our changing models of communication will affect how we interact with it.