Quite a bit of Ryan's show this morning was taken up with the aftermath of Storm Ophelia, with texts pouring in praising the emergency services and berating those who voluntarily went surfing in 130km per hour winds. In an admirable segue from Ophelia to a chat with journalist Áine Kerr, Ryan asked his guest about the media's part in reporting the storm, as well as her new online venture with fellow journalist Mark Little.

"To see people being sceptical on Twitter and Facebook yesterday, asking questions and making sure that before they would share something with their friends and family, that they were going to be the wise ones in the crowd saying, no, this is authentic, I've seen RTÉ journalists now verify this."

Áine has a background in news reporting. She's worked for the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, as well as working for new media news and information sites and platforms, including Storyful and, most recently, Facebook.

"My role for the last nineteen months in Facebook was to lead journalistic partnerships."

More and more people are consuming news through social media. The worry used to be that there would be a paucity of news for the interested browser, instead, it's turned out that there is an overwhelming amount of news and information out there. How is someone supposed to cut through the noise? That's where Áine and Mark Little's new venture comes in:

"What we're hoping to do is provide to you, using artificial intelligence, a personalised, localised news and information experience."

Áine firmly believes that there's room for both traditional journalism and news delivery and new media. The likes of Facebook and Twitter are, she told Ryan, critical for distribution of news stories. This was something that struck her during her time at Facebook:

"How can you use a platform of two billion people to help journalists find content, to help them distribute their stories, but critically, monetise it as well?"

Áine has a distinctly benign view of platforms like Facebook, seeing them ensuring that journalism not only survives but also thrives into the future. There have, of course, been headlines recently, as Ryan pointed out, about Facebook spreading fake news through its platform, which may have influenced the US presidential election. But Áine is confident that Facebook has learned a lot from the events that have led to them being called before Congress to account for the apparent spread of misinformation by, among others, Russian bots.

"What they need to do is, obviously these technological solutions, but they also need to invest in the education of their two billion community."

The new venture Áine is bringing to us will be a bundled, curated news and information experience, something to give us only what we think we need and want, rather than making us scroll endlessly, looking for some meaningful content. Crucially, what we take time to consume, has to come from trustworthy sources. And Áine is very keen not to reinforce what she calls people's polarising filter bubbles: their unconscious biases.

"Can we actually challenge you? You know, you read one particular article with one point of view. Could we suggest to you, actually here’s some other perspectives that you might want to consider as well."

The new venture is currently called Neva Labs, but Áine says as they build products, they will be given names as they're launched. You can hear the full chat with Áine, as well as the rest of The Ryan Tubridy Show here.