Hey Internet, where’s the actual news?

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If you are anything like the staff of The Madill Record you watch or read a lot of news and talk about it at work.

There is always some hot headline for us to consume and discuss ad nauseum.

Sometimes it’s the latest eye-popping contract for a professional athlete. Other times it’s a congressperson or media personality overreacting to a tweet by our head of state.

Frankly, there is a lot of noise out in the world. We get it; people tweet and share their opinions across the media landscape.

Sometimes, these views are wellinformed and even help inform us.

However, because there are so many ways to get news and information it can feel like a bit much.

A quick visit to Alexa.com showed not just how many news sites there are but also how broad the definition of news is. Alexa.com is an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco.

Alexa.com’s About Us page state “our global traffic rank is a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. The rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology that combines a site’s estimated average of daily unique visitors and its estimated number of pageviews over the past 3 months. We provide a similar country-specific ranking, which is a measurement of how a website ranks in a particular country relative to other sites over the past month.”

After that mouthful of explanation, we tried two of Alexa’s lists. First, was a list for all news sites: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/ Top/News Second was a list of Alexa’s top 50 global sites: https://www.alexa.com/topsites.

Even a quick look at these two lists shows how broad the definition of news is in today’s high-tech world.

The first list has many of the usual suspects from CNN to The New York Times (nytimes.com), washingtonpost.com , Foxnews.com, and Forbes. com.

However, it also has some unconventional sources of news such as Reddit and Shutterstock.

The modern news and information sources got even wider on the top sites list. Popular websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Instagram, Twitter, and IMBD (the Internet Movie Database) all made appearances.

Certainly, times have changed since the days that CNN broke broadcast news’ Big Three in 1991 and even more so since the “dot-com” bubble from 1997 to 2001.

While we aren’t sure about some sources of news and information, we know there Internet will give us plenty to talk about.