Do you care where you get your news from? And does it matter?

We used to be satisfied when we picked up our daily diet of news – up to a day late –  in stodgy broadsheet format or saucy, bite-sized red top flavour.

And we all knew a journalist when we met one. They were hard-drinking, thrice divorced cigarette smoking ne’ er do wells who would sell their grandmothers for a scoop.

But now we’re all journalists, potentially. Citizen journalists. Every mobile phone and tablet gives its owner the potential to capture news as it happens, and serve it up to a willing audience on a Twitter or blog-shaped plate, or on any number of hyper-local sites.

But there is a risk, in this world where everyone is publishing everything they see and commenting on it, that news sites will become little more than a showcase for “content harvesters”, regurgitated stories culled from the internet and written by others, repackaged at low-cost by bleary-eyed battery-farms of sunshine-starved “journos-lite” for easy consumption.

You may have seen comments from a former MailOnline journalist – and the paper’s response – on this very subject. If not, you might want to read My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online – and the paper’s response in this Guardian piece here.

In any event, I’d like to hope some of the reading public still has an an appetite for real journalism. Because someone has to hold those in power to account, rather than simply accept what they say. Someone needs to keep an eye on what is happening in our courts. Someone needs to do some actual investigation.

I’m not sure, yet, to what degree that is the case, but it does please me to see that, when looking at my former papers’ daily web figures, there is clearly still an appetite for proper, strong news values. Good, original stories are still well read and commented on.

Slightly less palatable to me is that there is often an even greater appetite for celebrity, or frothier pieces, on occasion. But the canny editor and journalist gives his readers both and you can only hope, consciously or otherwise, the public appreciates the full breadth of what they are getting. Because there’s no harm in enjoying a pudding with your meal, as long as you’re getting the main course too.