Why do people need journalist when information is over-supplied?

Sorry for being late again. (I begin to hate ACL now...)

The idea of information surplus is really frustrating. I feel like no one likes it. While people enjoy the free content online, they also complain about the declination of quality. Journalism practitioners, of course, are always whining about the difficulty of producing "good" content with limited budget.

Nobody likes it, and nobody has the control to stop the trend.

I don't think the information scarcity will ever come back.

Then, what's the journalism value now? For example, can we still hold the idea that we're going to "educate" our audience, when they already hold all the information that we have?

Last year the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan began putting all the meeting video tape online. My boyfriend thus asked me, then why do people need to read news since they have the access now.

I said, I think in the future journalists should serve as secretary. I think there are too many information that normal people can access. (Of course the accessibility is still limited.) No one can really digest all the information. I think journalists should serve as re-organize information and present in friendly format.

If friendly format for the audience is video, then we should do video. If the audience prefer other format, then we can do, too.

So I want to defense for Apple Daily here. I know a lot of people criticize Apple Daily for its fewer text and more pictures. However, this is what we need now. Who will have the leisure to spend one hour reading one newspaper now? Give audience some infograph, tables, and charts. A juicy story doesn't necessarily need to be told in words.

And, last part. I think the reason that newspaper circulation is still high in Asia lies in different life style. Take Tokyo in Japan for example. Most of the people work in Japan lives in suburban. They spend two hours to four hours everyday on subway. Many of them thus read newspaper on the train. (I wonder if this is the reason that the newspapers in Japan are still very intense. Because it needs to offer content for readers to read longer than one hour?)

Hong Kong and Taipei are also cities that mass transportation is widely used. I only buy Apple Daily when I need to spend several hours on the train.

And here in the U.S., people spend a lot of time on driving, which is impossible to read newspaper. That's why NPR is popular, I guess?