Two events in June 2009, the Iranian protests and the death of Michael Jackson, were read here as a shift in how news flows and in what the audience is asked to do. In both cases the information arrived in fragments, through Twitter, blogs, Flickr and YouTube.
Those fragments used to reach only the journalist. The professional role was to contact sources, assess and verify what they said, and assemble a settled account to be delivered as a finished package in print or on air, usually over the course of a day. What changed was that the public now had the fragments too, and was doing that work in public and much faster.
When Jackson died there was an explosion of activity on Twitter, much of it arguing about whether the reports from TMZ and the Los Angeles Times could be believed. People went to television and to mainstream news sites to check what they were seeing, which is to say they followed up news tips and cross-checked sources. The Iranian protests produced the same pattern for harder reasons: with journalists restricted, accounts of rallies, arrests and deaths came out through social media, and reporters and readers alike were left sorting through conflicting versions. As the New York Times put it, the news tips that reporters have always relied upon were now being aired in public.
The conclusion drawn was not that the professional had become redundant. Someone able to authenticate and contextualise was needed more than before, alongside a public literate enough to read the flood of material.