A favorite task at The Monitor for more than a year-and-a-half has been developing the At a Glance section on page 2.

My affection for this contemporary take on a classic news digest format is entirely self-serving. It justifies an ongoing world-wide search of the Internet for news, insights and information which, hopefully will be of particular interest to our readers.

Back in the pre-Internet days, putting together a page like this would have been a daunting task. A writer would have needed the resources of a good library and a good reference librarian to pull off the research.

Photos and charts to illustrate key points or snippets of information would have been pulled individually off an old-fashioned wire or painstakingly culled from the “morgue” where stock wire service photos were archived along with news clips.

These days, as any Internet explorer knows, you just sign on to the Internet – providing all systems are go – and away you go!

The ease with which one can gather information, however, has, as I have sorrowfully learned, both its good points and its drawbacks.

One of the most troublesome drawbacks is that not only can explorers track news that’s “trending now,” around the globe but what people think of it as well. Reading the comments on almost any story on the Catholic Church – or Christianity in general – for instance, can try the soul.

The comment phenomenon – where unidentified folks can fulminate at length about any issue under the sun, often in a particularly malicious way – is an example of what some sociologists are referring to as problematic computer use that interferes with daily life.

Reading scores of scathing comments on literally any story last week – from the area minister who asked his church leaders to drop Facebook, saying it led to marital infidelity and then had to admit his own infidelity, to Prince William’s impending wedding to the election of Archbishop Dolan as the next president of the USCCB – raised the question of  how Catholics can stay tuned and harness the good that is also out there on the Internet.

One of the really good things about selecting the content for At a Glance is getting to do just that on a regular basis by visiting Catholic and indeed Christian sites around the world. Regular visits to a site called http://catholicblogs.blogspot.com offer the positive experience of sifting through hundreds of Catholic sites by organizations, institutions and individuals – devoted to sharing the Gospel message.

This site might be an example of what Bishop Ronald Herzog of Alexandria, La., was thinking when he urged bishops Nov. 19 to recognize social media as a “new form of pastoral ministry.”

Speaking to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, Bishop Herzog, a member of the bishops’ Committee on Communications, encouraged his peers to become fluent in the language of the new media and use it as a tool for evangelization.

He said that young people in particular use social media as their first point of reference in obtaining everything from news of the world to updates on their friends. It is simply the way they communicate.

Internet exploration has revealed in fact, that all generations are active in social media and it would be great to hear from young, old and in between about sites that share a Gospel message. Please e-mail me with them at [email protected]