Online news, however you feel about it, is here to stay. Many people love the fact that all of the news that is happening in the world is available at their fingertips, either on their laptop or home computer, or even on their cell phone anywhere that they get cell phone reception, for them to consume at their own pace, and for them to pick through and consume only those news stories that they deem relevant to them. All of the stuff that they consider boring or irrelevant, they can simply choose not to click on, and it will be nothing more than a headline that they read in passing in their search for news stories that they actually are interested in reading. Other people lament the supposed decline and fall of the traditional news mediums, that is newspapers, radio news broadcasts, and television news broadcasts, that is due to come about at any moment, or has even already happened, depending on who you ask, as a result of the rise of online news. While there is a lot of overstatement and fanaticism about online news, the simple fact is that the internet has revolutionized information, and so online news has completely changed the face of the news industry. It is hard to argue that online news is a bad thing, but some people still do. This is no surprise, as with any innovation, there are people who cling to the old structure, many times because their job and therefore their livelihood depend on it, and refuse to adapt to a change. A look at the simple facts of the ways that online news has changed the news industry, however, makes it very difficult to argue that online news is in anyway a bad thing, except as a impetus for change for those entrenched in the old news business structure.
To put it very simply and very plainly, online news allows news consumers to consume the news they want to consume and only the news they want to consume, whenever they want to consume it, however they want to consume is, and from whomever they want to consume it. To look at this in more detail, online news allows people to choose their news on a story by story basis, rather than consuming an entire news broadcast, be it a television broadcast or a radio broadcast, just to head the few items of news that they are interested in. It is similar to skimming a newspaper and only reading the articles that have headlines which appeal to you, but much easier than collecting and navigating the giant stack of newspapers from around the world that is the equivalent to online news. Online news also allows people to consume the news whenever they want it, that is, whenever it is convenient for them, at any time or day or night, or even at the very moment that the news is breaking, rather than waiting for, say, the evening news, or the morning news, or the hourly news, or whatever the scheduled intervals for news broadcasts are on a particular medium. One other important innovation of online news is that it gives people more choices in the source of their news. In the past, the only options were the different major networks, but not there are literally millions of various news sources available to people, considering how many people have blogs where they write about the events that they observe in the world, which really, when you think about it, is all that news is.