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A personal view of the ex‐editor of Guardian Unlimited and acknowledged new media expert on the problems of managing and juggling the digital information flow in the workplace. Considers the sheer speed at which we are expected to work in cyberspace. The benefits and problems associated with e‐mail in the workplace are discussed. The way we relate to e‐mail and how we allow it to dominate our lives are the key matters of concern.

The ex‐editor of Guardian Unlimited, considers the current position of newspaper Web sites. Points to the success of the old trusted brands. Agrees they cost a lot but believes newspapers have little choice but to continue to invest in them, they are becoming a fixed cost. Considers the rise and challenge of weblogs, or blogs – link‐driven sites each with a mixture of links, commentary, and personal data, comments and essays and poems.

Analyses the “dumbing down” syndrome highlighting main quotes from BBC online, Kirkus Reviews and an interview between Roan Hoag of Amazon.xom and Pete Hamill whose book “News is a Verb” which attempts to unmask US journalism’s dumbing down. Looks at various tabloid‐style choices of sensational headlines giving examples of these. Concludes that unlike the technology world, newspaper and broadcasting world is full of dreamers staring only at their own reflection!.

Discusses how the fierce competition for instant news and the inter‐relationship of news dissemination channels, from print to broadcast to Internet, can take a poorly authenticated story and magnify it to the point of spawning conspiracy theory, only to end up ridiculed. In such an environment the role of the information manager becomes central, as someone who understands the labyrinth trails of information, its iterations through the media and its evolution into objective facts which can be archived for the use of researching journalists. Thus information professionals add value to information far more than intelligent agents.

Mobile: ‘changing easily in expression, mood, purpose.’ Devices: ‘invent from existing principles or ideas.’ Definitions from Websters Universal Dictionary.

The role of software agents in the provision of personalised news is explored in the context of the NewsAgent for Libraries project, which has been developed as a prototype and is about to launch a new free news alerting service for library and information staff. The issues that have arisen as the project moves from the research phase to service implementation are described, along with the prospects for the planned service.

This paper aims to explore some initial and necessarily broad ideas about the effects of the world wide web on our methods of understanding and trusting, online and off.

The paper considers the idea of trust via some of the revolutionary meanings inherent in the world wide web at its public conception in 1994, and some of its different meanings now. It does so in the context of the collaborative reader‐writer Web2.0 (of today), and also through a brief exploration of our relationship to the grand narratives (and some histories) of the post‐war West. It uses a variety of formal approaches taken from information science, literary criticism, philosophy, history, and journalism studies – together with some practical analysis based on 15 years as a web practitioner and content creator. It is a starting point.

This paper suggests that a pronounced effect of the world wide web is the further atomising of many once‐shared Western post‐war narratives, and the global democratising of doubt as a powerful though not necessarily helpful epistemological tool. The world wide web is the place that most actively demonstrates contemporary doubt.

This is the starting place for a piece of larger cross‐faculty (and cross‐platform) research into the arena of trust and doubt. In particular, the relationship of concepts such as news, event, history and myth with the myriad content platforms of new media, the idea of the digital consumer, and the impact of geography on knowledge that is enshrined in the virtual. This paper attempts to frame a few of the initial issues inherent in the idea of “trust” in the digital age and argues that without some kind of shared aesthetics of narrative judgment brought about through a far broader public understanding of (rather than an interpretation of) oral, visual, literary and multi‐media narratives, stories and plots, we cannot be said to trust many types of knowledge – not just in philosophical terms but also in our daily actions and behaviours.

This paper initiates debate about whether the creation of a new academic “space” in which cross‐faculty collaborations into the nature of modern narrative (in terms of production and consumption; producers and consumers) might be able to help us to understand more of the social implications of the collaborative content produced for consumption on the world wide web.

Virtually all UK and US newspapers and the vast majority of regional and even local titles are now represented on the web. Indeed, the Yahoo news and media directory lists no less than 114 UK newspapers online (as of November 1998). Broadcasters from the BBC and Sky downwards, and all the famous news agencies (Press Association, Reuters etc.) also boast comprehensive Internet services. With such an array of sources available, the future of mass access to the Internet, possibly via TV terminals, suggests that more and more people may soon opt for this medium to receive the bulk of their news information. This paper gives an overview of the characteristics of the medium illustrated with examples of how these are being used to both facilitate and enhance the content and dissemination of the news product. These characteristics include hyperlinking to external information sources, providing archive access to past reports, reader interactivity and other features not possible to incorporate into more passive media such as the hardcopy newspaper. From a survey of UK and US news providers it is clear that American newspapers are exploiting the advantages of web information dissemination to a far greater extent than their British counterparts, with the notable exception of The Electronic Telegraph. UK broadcasters, however, generally appear to have adapted better to the new medium, with the BBC rivaling CNN in its depth and extent of news coverage, use of links and other elements.

A synthesis of some of the themes and ideas developed in a recently published book about the future of information: i in the sky: visions of the information future. Common themes included: problems in defining information and defining future time‐scales, theubiquity of information, accessibility, privacy censorship and control, customisation ofinformation products, the development of the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence and cybernetics, changes in working roles and structures of organisations, information literacy, information overload and the organisation and retrieval of information.