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In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was out of control. Oil was gushing out and no one knew how to stop it. BP had done a call-out for solutions, seemingly because they had no idea what else to do. So the Guardian environment team did its own call-out called: send us your ideas for how to cap the Gulf oil spill. We created a Googledoc for readers to post their suggestions, and before we knew it we had ideas from professional divers, marine engineers, physicists, biochemists, mechanical engineers, petrochemical and mining workers, pipework experts. We curated some of the best, and subjected them to scrutiny. It was an incredibly rich and deep piece of work, made possible because of the people formerly known as the audience. Some of your readers really do know more than you.

My favourite example of this was during the 2009 London protests against the G20 meeting, when our reporter, Paul Lewis, was investigating what happened to a newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who had collapsed and died while walking through the protests. The pathologist reported that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack. We were searching for eyewitnesses. We put callouts on Twitter and on the Guardian site, and within hours Paul was contacted by a Guardian reader in the US. This man was an investment fund manager who had been in London on business; he'd slipped out of his meetings to have a look at the protests, and film them on his smartphone. On reading our callout at his home in New York, he looked back at his footage, and discovered very clear images showing Ian Tomlinson being shoved to the ground by a policeman. As you can imagine, it was a big scoop. Although the police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, he was later dismissed for gross misconduct. The pathologist has been struck off. In August the police settled a civil action by the Tomlinson family by issuing a formal apology and agreeing to pay compensation.

Many publishers have responded to the web by commodifying news and producing so-called "churnalism" – rewriting wires, press releases and each other.

In his 2009 book Flat Earth News, my colleague Nick Davies showed that 80% of stories in Britain's quality press were not original and that only 12% were generated by reporters.

Look at the famous photograph of the new Prince George emerging from hospital, with hundreds of photographers and reporters looking at him. What would have happened if all but, say, three of them had been off doing something else? What bounteous other stories were we missing that day? If we're not careful, photographs like these will be our industry's epitaph.

What we're really here for are the things that matter, with Lord Northcliffe's famous dictum ringing in our ears: "news is something someone somewhere doesn't want printed. Everything else is advertising".

In the print world, you never knew what was really being read, despite all those readership surveys. And you had no way to try to get it read more, because once the paper was out, that was it. You kissed it goodbye at last edition.

And, in light of these revelations, there is a new issue: countries such as Brazil are talking seriously about a 'national internet': so instead of the world wide web, we face the prospect of a Brazilian internet, an American internet, maybe an Australian internet. What a loss that would be.

Our yearning for the bigger picture is quickly and dramatically fulfilled. But when we get the bigger picture, it's bloody confusing and we suddenly yearn for a smaller picture. Maybe a different smaller picture than the one we had before. Broader... but smaller? Is that even realistic?

one of the reasons the internet feels so thrilling is that it liberates us from editorial filters; suddenly everything is out there for us to grab – and much of it for free.

There have always been people and organisations filtering on our behalf.

Our friends aren't helping us downsize. We've relied on word-of-mouth information since the dawn of time, but social media have taken this age-old concept and tried to thrash it into some kind of working business model.

Do I want my consumption to be driven by the online herd? And who are these people anyway?

Oversharing, as it's quaintly termed, sees us generate huge quantities of text, audio, photos and video, which we expect other people to consume; we feel vaguely irritated when they choose not to do so.

Some services can't decide whether to filter information for us or encourage supply, so they do both; Newsvine launched a few years back to streamline news consumption and only bring you the stories in which you were interested – but it also urged you to pen your own columns.

Essentially, it's up to us. It's a mental issue. Our frustration at filter failure wouldn't exist if we didn't feel the pressure to keep up with the information flow. We don't need to read everything we're told to read or watch everything that we're told to watch. Completism is dead; it's a matter of dipping in and dipping out. Don't worry. Just let the information go.