Column space is a prize piece of real estate in a newspaper. In a medium that is restricted by physical size and print run, editors need to select the stories that will interest readers and will of course sell more newspapers.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for a newspaper's modern incarnation, the website for the newspaper. Pages are cheap to put together and publish. News stories ranging from the headline news of the day that affects the whole world to celebrity spats on social media. It seems as if there is no check in place to say whether a story is worthy of being published. All too often, even the most ridiculous of stories get published.

I'm writing this because people that comment on whether a story is worth the column space on a newspaper's website tend to forget or not know that website pages are cheap when compared to the printed word on a dead tree.

Newspapers are restricted to a set number of pages and for a limited time. There's also the printing costs and shipping costs in getting all these newspapers around the country. Even the smallest of stories have to justify their worthiness to be printed in the final edition of the newspaper for the following day.

Now look at a news website. Technology today can now scale websites to millions of visitors a month on platforms that are readily available to many. A typical news website will be continually updated throughout the day. Every hour sees the addition of more news stories and existing ones being updated with new information if they are still relevant.

Even news with the smallest confirmed information is published with breaking news on a story being published so that so that news website can say, "Yeah, we're investigating this story too".

As more details on these stories come through, they are quickly expanded into more details pieces with links to other related stories and sometimes even interactive maps or graphs are added. There is simply no limit to the column space that a news website has. It's is always growing as along as it is relevant.

Then there's the column space on the front page of a newspaper. Reserved only for the big stories of the day, it was once the coveted part of the newspaper where many journalists want to see their story being published.

The news website is a little less precious though about what makes front page news or in this case, home page news. The home page has become a carousel of stories that are always in a state of change. Developing stories are pushed to the top portion of the page, with other stories eventually tailing off to the bottom. Where newspapers in the past only published a handful of stories on their front page, news sites can easily accommodate over 50 different stories on their home page.

There's no rule now in saying what makes the cut for published news. The idea of column space is dead. News now moves at such a frantic pace that news sites change every minute depending on what's happening around the world. News websites just want to be seen to be reporting the news that happening now rather than reporting the news that is relevant or important.

What if there was a news website that respected the fixed number of pages they had available and only reported on the news that mattered? What if it remained static for 24 hours and only updated once a day? Would you read it?

That's the problem though, no one wants a news website like that. The majority of us expect the news to be updated on a minute by minute basis and within easy reach on any one of the computers or devices they happen to be near at the time.

Column space was once treasured, but sadly it has been replaced by the rule that a story can be published if that story is relevant or might bring more visitors to that newspaper's website. It's that last part that irks me, as it appears to be the guiding factor on many published news stories that are just not relevant with what's happening in the world today.

I'll sign off now, as I'm running out of my column space of 750 words.