It didn't occur to the author that social media is the new journalism.
Why? Because high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had.
I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes that American monoliths as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs, pursuing the task without compensation, training, or for that matter, sufficient training to make public officials even care who it is they're lying to or who they're withholding information from.
Indeed, the very phrase 'citizen journalist' strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbour who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbour. He is not, in any sense, a 'citizen social worker'. Just as the neighbour with a garden hose and good intentions is not a 'citizen firefighter'. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters."
- David Simon
"You do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at city hall,
or in the courthouse hallways, or in the bars where police officers gather..."
One example process: local governments dish out taxpayer money to pseudo-independent "service organizations". Those organizations use part of these funds to buy advertising in local media and on public transit agencies. Those media, in turn, do flowery reporting on those local governments and soft-pedal police violence and union corruption, resulting in situations like "The Riders" in the Oakland Police Department[0]. This is too often the circle of modern urban "journalism". And that's without even addressing the issue of predatory corporate behavior by publishers themselves[1].
The broader point: modern, for-profit media are exactly that -- for-profit businesses. Their fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder value. Objectivity and honesty are orthogonal to short- and medium-term profit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_v._City_of_Oakland
[1] http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.29.97/spanish-pre...
On the other hand, despite his cogent comments on the value of professional reporting, he now occupies himself as a television writer and producer. Make of that what you will.
Indeed, if you ignore economic news, political journalism seems to be better done by biggish professional entities. But they don't seem to have any other niche remaining.
Also, the GP claim about "social media", well, if you listen to it and hear "Facebook", it's certainly wrong. We badly need a better platform. But that does not open the niche to journalists.
There's no reason to thing a firefighter would do anything other than their job, there's no obvious reason for a bias.
A uneducated social worker, much like other medical/psychological workers, is a dangerous thing, so many require licences.
What licence requirements are there for professional journalists? I see plenty bad stats/reporting in journalism, so nothing that prevents that.
I get social media is how the results of journalism get distributed, but what funds the journalism itself if traditional news/media companies go out of business? Is twitter or facebook going to fund investigative journalists? What's the business model for a company looking to pay people to research and write about things if 'social media is the new journalism'? Do we rely on non-profits/donations?
Or are you proposing we'll get all our news in a decentralized manner via people posting what's going on around them?