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With every sneeze making it to news sites these days, Tina Brown says journalists need to use their creativity to stand out.

At Friday's opening of the ninth annual ONA conference, Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, charged her media peers to choose content with an angle that will attract an audience overwhelmed by the growing volume of unfiltered information and recycled stories.

"We have to go back to thinking about what editors can do in this age where, in a sense, algorithms rule the day," Brown said, citing Google and Yahoo as examples of a new breed of mechanized, faceless journalists. "The volume of those sites now has made it time for editors to reassert themselves about trying to curate in a more focused way, in a more point-of-view way, in a more rigorous way, material they really feel will serve their audience."

Brown, whose news aggregation site, The Daily Beast, will launch in October, faced the challenges of choosing material when she began to conceptualize her website.

Because there is "such a cacophony of voices now, such a blizzard of links and tweets and calls to action day in and day out," she said, people seeking to be informed are becoming increasingly flustered. They can no longer access information quickly and efficiently because they must sort through the muck and mire on the Internet.

People have become so saturated with media, which Brown calls a "hall of mirrors," they can't find any new or insightful information. Stories are repeatedly recycled as "churnalism."

He said news consumers may also have trouble discerning "flogs" -- blogs that pretend to be independent but are financed by special-interest groups.

"It's the part that scares me the most because this is increasingly insidious stuff," she said.

Journalists must sift through all this fake and redundant news, she added. Creativity, Brown said, will be the key to circumventing the information overload and producing stories that rise above the rest.

"The first duty of an editor is to find a voice immediately," she said. "It's about your choice of stories as opposed to somebody else's. It's about your take on the world, your world view and the talent with which you surround yourself."

Brown cited The First Post, Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics and Arts & Letters Daily as aggregators with a distinctive voice that have learned to filter through the excess of information, and give people news they need.

It's all about balance. There's still an audience for serious, in-depth reporting and long-form journalism. But the online reader requires more, said Brown: "You have to create an environment that is so appealing and seductive that people will want to be there."

--By Alex Kowalski