Until relatively recently, the circulation and consumption of news had remained remarkably unchanged for a very long time. It was parsed by journalists and editors, and distributed within the limited confines of print space and available airtime.

The internet has erased those old limitations, and with them journalists’ monopoly on setting the news agenda. Furthermore, social media platforms have swallowed the old distribution model to a massive extent. Recent Pew Center research shows that 70 percent of Reddit users get news on that site, 66 percent of Facebook users, and 59 percent of Twitter users. The demarcation between mainstream media and social media has now all but vanished.

But with this new freedom to personalize our information streams, we invariably surround ourselves with people and ideas we find agreeable (it’s human nature) and exclude those who make us uncomfortable. We replace the old gatekeepers of masthead media brands and instead create a digital echo chamber – one that dictates our news consumption to a large degree. Do we risk only ever hearing one side of the story?

In this week’s episode of The Storyful Podcast, Storyful journalist and host Stephy Burnett is joined in the Australian Bureau by editor Stephanie Hunt and journalists Amy Hutchinson, and Kevin Nguyen to discuss the opportunities and challenges for journalism represented by this change.

Kevin Nguyen is a news journalist at Storyful. For more information on Storyful, visit storyful.com or follow us on Twitter.

The Storyful Podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, Tunein and Soundcloud.