pick me up

Do you read mX?

I picked up today’s issue as I was on my way through Central Station; I figured I might as well give my brain something vaguely interesting to churn through as I readied myself for the long journey home. mX isn’t the worst printed publication I’ve read; though it certainly isn’t the best. This was confirmed for me as I read through it, and came across an article about someone creating a bot system which automates mundane tasks for you in World of Warcraft. “Hang on,” I thought to myself, “This feels like deja vu.”

It was a very strong case of deja vu.

I had read the same article earlier that day online; on Slashdot originally, though they’d linked an article first published on the BBC. Slashdot’s linkage of the article I can accept; the audience of the BBC news site, while almost definitely having some cross-section with the Slashdot audience, is by no means similar. In addition to that, Slashdot’s audience are provided with the means to discuss articles with great depth and fidelity with the use of Slashdot’s comment and moderation system.

This got me thinking about a few things; firstly, it totally ruined any conceptions I’d had about the mX newspaper. I knew it was more a throwaway paper than any of the big-name journalistic strongholds (as is clearly evidenced by advertising throughout the pages, urging readers to ‘pick me up, then bin me’), but I thought that, even so, there was original research and good old-fashioned journalism going on behind the scenes. Apparently not quite as much as I’d thought, however.

It seems to me as though mX is mostly a paper version of the day’s internet news — no doubt the WoW story is not the only news adapted (barely — the text in the mX article and that of the BBC/Slashdot ones were nearly identical) for consumption “IRL” by the news-reading masses. It makes me wonder just how much original thought is left in the news articles we read every day; be they online or printed.

I suppose it’s part of the reason why blogging was such a big thing — it’s essentially millions of people, worldwide, for the most part, thinking, and writing down those thoughts. Makes for an interesting digital landscape.