News, information and value

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.