Like most people, I've been a consumer of news for the majority of my life. The method I received it has changed, going from the morning paper and evening news as a kid to Twitter, Facebook and various news websites operating on a 24-hour basis.

Four weeks ago, I started working at OnMilwaukee, and for the first time, I'm actually a part of providing that news, not just absorbing and reacting to it. And the two sides of it are more different than I expected.

Unlike many of the writers here, I don't have a background in journalism. I have a BA in sociology from UW-Madison (go Badgers!) and a Masters in Social Work. I spent seven years doing clinical research at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I'm also a published romance novelist (Andy did an article on that last summer), but fiction writing is a completely different world from news media. So to say the learning curve in this new job has been steep is like calling Lake Michigan a swimming hole.

I've long thought there's something broken with how many outlets report breaking news. Besides the much talked about way CNN will spend hours on a story they know nothing about, speculating – did the attacker have seven heads? Wolf Blitzer reports – to fill airtime, the Ted Cruz VP announcement on Wednesday also stood out to me.

Around 9 a.m., CNN reported that Cruz would make a "very important announcement" at 4 p.m. Outlets spent the day speculating about what it could be. Then, around 1:30 p.m. (2:30 for those East Coasters), several major news outlets – CNN, Washington Post, The New York Times and others I'm sure – tweeted links to stories that said Cruz would be announcing he had picked Carly Fiorina as his running mate. Then finally, after another 90 minutes, Cruz actually announced what we already knew. The instant the words left his mouth, they were already old news.

While a month ago, this still would have struck me as a weird way to run things just to fill time, now my instinct is to think about why it seems strange, why the news is run this way even though it doesn't make a ton of sense and even ponder how it might be done better.

And, of course, to be glad that we're not nearly as insane at OnMilwaukee (you could make an argument that we're a little insane, but in a fun way) as they are over at CNN. The sense here is that while we want to be timely, of course, it's more important to be accurate. And to say something interesting that adds to what's already out there.

Otherwise, we're just more noise in an already noisy world.