And we can also read the people we like on the media company websites. When we open up adelaidenow, for example, we may rush straight to the great Rucci to see if he has sorted out the Port Adelaide financial mess. We may overlook some other useful information.

It’s different when you hold the paper in your hand. You may buy The Independent Weekly to see how Tom Richardson has nicked the pollies or if Philip White’s tonsils have lasted another week, but on the way you see that Hendrik Gout has unearthed another gem that passed the Murdoch empire by – and you start to read.

If we use only the internet, we are at the mercy of bloggers – and our prejudices. We may call up a major newspaper, but we know who we like to read, and they are the people whose views we agree with, or whose arguments we reckon are sound.

It’s easy to do. With The Australian, for example, one always finds time for the glowering soundness of Mike Steketee – ahead of the showier ponies – and for Frank Devine, too, for his use of words and odd humour, not his odder pontifications.

In the United States, naturally, where all the trends come from, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, calls this emerging practice “The Daily Me”.

Instead of getting a wide range of opinions to worry our day, we pick those with whom we agree. We’re not as far along the line as the US yet, but it’s coming. It means that if we don’t like a particular political party, we look up people likely to take a shot at them. If we’re hot about an issue, we look for others who share the anger.

Nicholas D Kristof of The New York Times has had a good look at this. He finds that people tend to mix and take their attitudes from people just like them. One extensive survey showed that people don’t like talking politics with people of different views and, strangely, this was particularly true of the well-educated.

In another experiment, liberals and conservatives were separated to discuss such fraught issues as affirmative action and climate change. No matter the private views taken into the discussion, after only 15 minutes the liberals were all for affirmative action and cranky about climate change, while the conservatives all opposed affirmative action and were thoroughly sceptical about climate change.

One remembers Graham Perkin, legendary editor of The Age, on the phone one day instructing: “Jesus, chap, don’t discuss politics at the golf club. It puts you off your putting.” (That doesn’t apply up at Mount Lofty. We’ve got some lively ones there.)

The internet is not going to go away. The opinions on the net will continue to grow. The people with single issues or particular axes to grind will continue to push their singular views or pick away at their causes. This puts a tremendous responsibility on our media.

In a way, theoretically we now have the best of it. Radio can flash the news, television show the event and newspapers analyse it. But it will take a tremendous fight to stop readership slipping and ratings dropping.

Fluff is not the answer. Nor is the answer to cut staff and close down the bureaux across the world and rely on fewer and fewer sources, most of them corrupted by governments.

The journalists’ union, the Media Alliance, has released a survey of journalists here and in the US and UK. The report Life in the Clickstream: the Future of Journalism confirms the pessimism, seeing the industry in “a systemic collapse, not just a cyclical downturn”, but it also confirms journalists are excited and eager about their roles in a new media.

The clear message to companies is to keep the quality up. Even if the future goes entirely digital and online, reporters will still have to be out there digging and thinkers will have to keep on thinking.

How we get the message doesn’t matter. We still have to know what’s going on. If we all simply take our news from each other, it will be much worse than a few missed putts.