For better or worse, the internet is constantly augmenting our habits and behavior. But like clockwork, each new innovation it facilitates is paired with its own doom-and-gloom sentiment as to what it will subsequently “kill” in its wake. For many years, it’s been said it was journalism. Newspapers. Publishing. Newsrooms. In as many ways as they could have bit the bullet, they were projected to go. But the strange and powerful thing about technology is that it challenges us to evolve, to adjust our habits and behavior in places we least expect, and move ahead.

Contrary to the last decade of predictions and public debate, the field of journalism is most definitely still with us. But the way we consume the news indeed continues to shift tectonically. The most obvious new addition is that of hyper-curation, the ability to cherry pick exactly what you want to be made aware of in a day and nothing more. The Evernotes, Instapapers, and LongReads of the world have facilitated our pack-rat nature, allowing us an endless stack of literature whenever time allows. Twitter, Pulse, SkyGrid, and Reeder have become the ever-present news scroll on the bottom of our workdays, bubbling up fleeting pieces of information that may never get investigated beyond the headline. Little Printer is poised to become the cutesy receipt of each digital day, a one-stop-recap of all that came and went in 24 hours of internet life.

Without proper self control, it’s terrifyingly easy to institute a self-imposed filter bubble through the process. Not interested in politics? No problem—unfollow, and find out only what you want about the world around you. Industry obsessed? Perfect—we’ve got 25 suggested threads to turn your brain into a never-ending echo chamber.

Simultaneously, however, there remains a constant quest for narratives, the childlike pursuit of storytelling and immersive experiences that tablets practically demand. Flipboard, for instance, has found success being a beautiful mobile display of fake context, laying out news snapshots of your choosing into a dreamy visual thread that gives the impression of interconnectedness.

And who can help but want to add some context to their news blurbs? Up til now, we’ve been accustomed to professionally packaged narratives, even if you never thought to look. The old art of architecting a newspaper layout—the kind of decisions that crowned one article A1 column-worthy, relegated others to below the fold, and some to page B11—wove a subconscious narrative in the mind of the reader by engineering the path of their consumption. However subtle, there was weight in that context that we miss by curating only those headlines we wish to see.

But despite all this, there still remains a desire for human curation and for the credibility of a vetting process. As we see now months after the much debated paywall went up at the New York Times, the paper is reporting profits in the millions for digital subscribers alone. And in the world of endless free media, having a publishing product people are continuously willing to pay for is the ultimate coup.

But is one model actually superior to the other? While “traditional” news offered up a finite, procedural narrative for a reader to paw through, this new behavior puts readers in a position ripe with potential for endless learning. It engenders in them an active relationship to the news, as not just consumers but participants that are constantly required to discern, judge, and question content for validity and relevance.

Ultimately, a team of editors at an established paper is going to curate stories as they see fit, just as you alone at your iPad do. This curation has become a shared activity among readers and news professionals, a process the average person can now value and understand. Through these actions we’re forced to craft the context of the news on our own, to seek out why something has meaning and why it should be meaningful to me as a reader, a thinker, a member of the discourse. Resisting the invitation would be a lost opportunity — or worse, would land you out-of-the-loop in an era where knowledge truly is once again king.