It may seem like people have been gawking at the proliferation of online news sources for ages now, but it was not so long ago that readers had a much narrower field of options. The Democratic and Republican national conventions threw that fact into high relief at the end of last summer. The New York Times media critic David Carr catalogued the presence of online news outlets during the Democratic gathering: “Politico, which also puts out a newspaper, had 40 people in Denver. The Huffington Post had 20 people, Talking Points Memo had 9, Daily Kos had 10, Slate had 7 and Salon had 9. That list is far from comprehensive and does not begin to describe how thoroughly mediated this convention was.” And save for the latter two (which sent the fewest reporters) and TPM, all of those outlets just wrapped up either their first or second presidential campaign.

Add to this mix the seemingly endless variety of blogs, and it’s no wonder that many readers—even professional journalists—feel lost. What most misunderstand, though, is that the problem is not information overload, but rather access-to-information overload. Since well before the creation of the printing press, there has been more news available on a given day than any one person could follow, and more information than any one reporter could process. It’s just that today both reporter and reader have much greater access to the news and information, and as such, there is a greater need to employ filters and other tools to help us organize and manage the deluge.

Plenty of these devices already exist, but it takes some time to set them up and maintain them. Most are right under readers’ and journalists’ lcd-strained eyes, embedded in the program that provides all that access to the news in the...

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