Respectfully, I’m not arguing about what is news or what isnt news. That to me is immaterial and being a journalism student you have no choice whether you think you need or don’t need gatekeepers. They exist, they’re usually called editors.Keep in mind the massive amounts of information/stories that are out there? You can only pick and choose a few of thousands. Right there is “gatekeeping” These stories are chosen for a variety of reasons which I won’t go into here, although they usually have to do with what helps to sell more whatever...Anyway, citizen journalism has no editors or gatekeepers, However as Mr. Becker points out it also lets anyone publish without corroboration which can bring out the crackpots. So if you are like me, you try to find a healthy balance of both...

What do you mean? Can you expand your thoughts here?

@Michael... I agree that we need some system of determining what is factual and what is not. Citizen journalism is great and I think it adds to our field. Sites like Twitter, we need to be cautious what we read on there as a lot of information can be misrepresented. We need some other way to fact check this. Moderating and removing ideas I think is not an option as this would impose on the 1st amendment and I think that isn’t what should be done. I agree may be calling people out for misinformation is a good idea.

Sadly, this selection is often done with revenue in mind and not any thought about what people should know to be functioning members of a democratic society. So citizen journalists step in to “fill in the gaps” they perceive in the mainstream media’s coverage.

I’m all for that, except when that leads to citizen journalists who believe they are on a crusade against some news industry conspiracy — people who believe they are “exposing” the stories that the mainstream media is sweeping under the rug.

Maybe I’m naive, but in all my years in the industry, I’ve never seen any hint of such conspiracies to hide “the truth.” Mostly what I’ve seen are lots of people who are almost always stressed and crunched for time. They wouldn’t have time to conspire if they wanted to.

People have always been dissatisfied with newspapers and the media’s coverage of events. Before now, few people had access to tools that would let them publish their own news to a wide number of people. Now they can, and that ability is having a profound effect on the whole newspaper industry, casting journalists in a new light. Is this a good thing? I can’t judge that, but it is an important thing.

The easiest way is to think of them like you’d think of any other source of information. That is, be skeptical. Gone are the days when we could blindly believe sources just because they were published.

People may still have in the accuracy of printed matter like the Encyclopedia Britannica or World Almanac, but I’m not so sure. The Web has taught us one powerful lesson about accuracy: It never existed. Only varying degrees of accuracy existed, and that accuracy, such as in multiple-volume encyclopedias, was only as good as the copy editors and fact-checkers — and don’t forget that, in truth, most of those errors remained in the printed matter, even after they were discovered, because correcting them would have cost too much money in reprints.

Reporters have always been fact checkers and curators of information. We need to keep up that tradition now. You wonder how we might go about validating information we see online. My answer is that it requires hard detective work and a willingness to call up the people behind the online avatars and actually find out what they know.

I’m on the fence about how I feel about citizen journalism. I agree with your thoughts about citizen journalism. I don’t think that journalism should be an elitist profession. I think there are some valuable contributions from citizen journalists. Sites like Twitter have enabled citizens to comment on various events and post information. However, I think this causes chaos and multitude of thoughts and ideas. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but how can we be sure this information is accurate? Hmm...