This seem to be getting worse in the news game these days. It’s generally accepted that everything you see on a television screen is in some way fiction, even the part that’s supposed to look like it’s news. The more informed amongst us get our news from the internet. Yet over the last few weeks I’ve noticed things getting worse there too. Perhaps it’s just a symptom of subscribing to too many RSS feeds.

Apple news is the worst offender. There are too many rumours to deal with and that only leads to news stories that have headlines that end with question marks. They tell us what anonymous sources say and we’re supposed to accept this. Generally the more popular sites don’t go for stuff like that, Engadget for example are generally a reliable source of technology news. Yet more and more I’m seeing sites that just copy them, or tell a story and then end with “according to Engadget”. That sucks. I’ve already read Engadget and I didn’t need another site to tell it to me again.

I’m told that news publishing on the internet is all about being first. Personally I see that as a complete waste of time and effort. You might be the first to break a story by a couple of minutes but that doesn’t means anything to me. I read the news sites that I read and if they have the story that I’m interested in then it doesn’t matter if they had it five minutes later than any other site. I’m not sat at my computer doing nothing but refreshing Google Reader waiting for something to come up. In other words I won’t even know who got the story first.

I’m also starting to see sites breaking single stories up in to several stories in a clear attempt to get visitors to their site. For example a couple of days ago Apple put out a section of iTunes dedicated to the best selling items of 2009. It was full of media of each type that the iTunes store sells, movies, podcasts, TV shows, apps etc. You would have thought that at best that’s one news story. No. Macworld UK managed to split that into four different posts. It took one post to tell me that iTunes have posted the best selling movies of 2009, another to tell me that they’ve posted the best selling TV shows of 2009 and so on. Surely that’s just taking the piss. I managed to tell you about it in a sentence, not four news stories. I find this type of news reporting extremely patronising. All I really needed to know about that was that there’s a best of 2009 section in iTunes. If I want to know what’s in it I’ll go to iTunes and take a look. When I’m there I’ll see that it’s split in to four different sections for the different types of media that the store sells. What a waste of Macworld’s time. I’d really expect better from them. Perhaps they’re just fed up of posting rumours and questions.

The people who make the news on the internet really need to raise their game. It wasn’t too long ago that they were miles ahead of television and print news who are well know for just publishing anything that shows up on their news wire without any fact checking. Publish as quickly as you can and then take back the mistakes later may be good enough for television and newspapers but it didn’t used to be good enough for big name news blogs. If they go that way too exactly where are we supposed to get any form of reliable news.

Start your conspiracy theories now.