Journalists are having to get used to working in an "attention economy", where the proliferation of new media platforms has created an increasingly bitter struggle for smaller and smaller slices of audiences' attention. Having spent around eight months working in the office of the Reuters editor for ethics, innovation and standards, Wits and Columbia graduate Jackie Bischof considers the place of ethics in the brave new world of journalism.

It was impossible to write this column in one sitting. In front of a computer, my attention is spread across several browser tabs, automated news aggregators and rolling applications like Tweetdeck and iGoogle, instant messaging systems, and the hundreds of stories summarized and condensed into newsletters that land in my five e-mail inboxes throughout the day. I’m frequently tempted to turn to paper, pen and an Internet-free zone – a forest perhaps?

We’re living in a so-called attention economy , where the fight for attention has changed the way journalists report the news. Attention is in short supply. Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian writes that , on average, readers spend around 70 seconds reading news online a day compared to 25 minutes poring over a physical newspaper. This finding - terrifying to journalists - was cited recently in an Atlantic article on "How to Save the News ". [read more]