I'm not confident in the ability of the common internet user to distinguish interesting but unverified chatter from quality reporting. Despite the saying "don't believe everything you read", I think a lot of people do.

We don't have perfect choices. Imperfect journalism with limited access or access to the chatter. There is bad journalism too. People tend to be less on guard themselves when presented with bad or biased journalism. At least with twitter, people are less inclined to take everything at face value.

Anyway, I am confident. Earlier on people were making ridiculous arguments about how the internet is an untrustworthy source of information. All sorts of things that were highly speculative or untrue where being put online. Douglas Adams compare this to saying you can't believe everything you here on the telephone. I think this applies here too.

Twitter is new. People don't know how to treat it properly yet. The information you hear on a bus can be unreliable. It shouldn't be treated as a perfect sample. It may contain the opinions of crazy people, biased people & bus drivers. But it's still information. People are good at sifting through this kind of information.

Indeed. I'm reminded of Fisk's reports from Baghdad during Gulf War II, which in retrospect turned out to have been mostly made up (e.g. he reported fighting at Baghdad Airport that simply didn't happen, as embedded journalists who were actually on the scene pointed out).

But as he was saying what his fans wanted to hear (i.e. that lots of US soldiers were getting killed) his career blossomed nonetheless.

I'm dubious of whether this is a real advantage. While the opportunity to expose more analysis to the raw data is real, it's much more likely that some people will take some unverified quotes out of context and amplify them for their own political purpose, and these falsities will become "facts".

People will most greatly believe things they can verify themselves. Twitter + Google change the game. The sky is blue, things fall down, and a whole onslaught of cross-corroborating first-hand reports readily accessible over the web that claim a politician is dead or a company is polluting, even if those reports are intentional disinformation by their enemies.

I completely agree with your point. Normally, it would be up to the reporters to verify this info. With Twitter and such we can go right to the sources which means we have more of a responsibility to verify what we read on our own instead of taking it as fact.

Although we have none of the tools those reporters do. We're not on the scene. We're not asking questions of those immediate sources (we don't even know if they are truly eye-witnesses...)

Proper journalism is a complex thing requiring a lot more time, effort, and money than I have for every news story. Looking at the hysteria generated by the 'reporting' on various Social Media networks in Iran.... I'm confident that very few people have those things as well.

There is value in journalism, and we are seeing exactly what that is now. Forming truly informed opinions based on social media is nearly impossible. You're better off reading the national enquirer really.