Will Citizen Media Eliminate Professional News Sources?

With the rise of citizen media and citizen journalism through social media and our use of the internet for receiving information at an exceptionally fast rate, it really begs the question: is professional news becoming obsolete?

Twitter is probably the best example of citizen media because it is fast and to the point and through recent events like Hurricane Sandy or even the Eaton Centre shooting (which was first reported by Blue Jays player Brett Lawrie) we've seen its potential to spread news from a wide variety of sources on a worldwide scale in so little time. But how accurate is this? And what kind of details are missing?

An article about Hurricane Sandy from a few weeks back has the author discussing how easy it was to have misinterpreted information amongst the chaos of the event where a Twitter user @ComfortablySmug tried to mislead people such as by saying the New York Stock Exchange was flooded. What this shows is that by simply saying one thing that 'could' be true and without any sort of sources to back it up, Twitter makes people jump on the bandwagon and start to spread it quickly without any real idea of where it came from. CNN in particular picked this up which goes to show that even mainstream media uses social networks to aid their news.

Even though mainstream news uses these social media, it is still their job to fact check and pretty much weed through the noise to find actual information. Citizen media is good for getting a message out quickly and easily, but it often fails to offer any real insight into an event. Hence why pretty much 99% of the time you follow a major event on Twitter you won't see any specific details until it is tweeted by a mainstream news source. Mainstream media still does make mistakes however as seen with the Hurricane Sandy incident I mentioned earlier and in a more extreme case, that of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting where the killer was wrongly identified. The picture that CNN ran was actually the shooter's brother, Ryan Lanza, which shows that since mainstream news sources try to keep up with the speed of the internet they will make mistakes.

Just because they aren't as quick as citizen journalism though doesn't mean that it is nearly obsolete. Participatory media like Twitter are great for allowing the public to become involved and give different perspectives to an event which we might never see, but at the end of the day who are you going to rely on more; the professional team with proven results and years of experience, or a 17 year old kid who just happened to be there?