Winthrop Australia

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.

“The idea of working and creating these Learning Circles really helped us move closer to that ideal of being the people’s university to help people progress, with some facilitation on our part,” Anderson said.

Learning Circles are not limited to libraries, but are designed for use somewhere people can come together and take a course online. The model could also be used to fill in gaps in educational offerings both in school and the professional world, according to P2PU learning lead, Grif Peterson. “You can see the Learning Circles that are popping up around the world,” he said.

adiolab, Invisibilia, and the tongue-in-cheek tribute to radio-of-the-past, Thrilling Adventure Hour

Older kids need no encouragement: Freakonomics and Serial both have substantial teen followings, and teenage girls are the primary audience of Welcome to Night Vale, a comedic show about a fictional, conspiracy-laden town.

The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful

Audio stories prompted kids to draw more novel pictures, think up more unique questions, and solve problems in a more imaginative way than did TV tales.

he realization that her daughter was learning from audio led Brady-Myerov to found Listen Current, a company working to bring public radio into the classroom by curating content and providing resources to help teachers meet curricular requirements.

When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio. “That’s not to say children can’t or won’t listen longer,” she said, “that’s just what we’ve found works in the school setting.”

And, as Godsey reported in a recent piece for The Atlantic, TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.

When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.

In the children’s program The Show About Science, a 5-year-old named Nate interviews chemists, punk rockers, his mom, and more about animals, medicine, and other important scientific matters).

That the lion’s share of podcasts is downloaded doesn’t help: once a podcast is downloaded, all ties are severed and producers can’t know who’s listening, where they’re listening, for how long they’re listening, or if they listen to the shows they download at all. Without such analytics, podcasts are often seen as a less appealing medium for advertisers, many of which have been forced to rely on outdated methods like direct-response advertising—e.g., ads that promise 10 percent off a purchase if you enter a certain offer code.

When it comes to adults, listener surveys can help fill the data void. “Adults get back to you, they tweet at you, they leave voicemails, they tell you what they like and don’t like, what they listen to,” explained Thompson. “With kids the interaction is a lot trickier. The feedback loop is broken or, at least, it’s not as powerful as in other forms of media.” As a result, kids programs might struggle more than others to monetize.

Little Passports, which sends children a suitcase of goodies to help them follow two fictional explorers around the world and learn about geography, travel, and language as they go.

the Australian Broadcast Corporation launched a podcast for 7-12 year-olds. Called Short & Curly, the show explores curly ethical questions—Is stealing music and jokes really stealing? Should chimps have the same rights as kids? Is it ever okay to fight back against a bully?—in 15-to-20-minute episodes.

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.