My other caveat about this time of abundance is that while it’s great for a foreign-news junkie, I’m not sure how well it serves the passive reader. The profusion of unfiltered information can overwhelm without informing. So while it is true that the outside world learned almost instantaneously of the horrific August chemical attack in Syria, the flood of social media was contaminated by misinformation (some of it deliberate) and filled with contradictions — enough to let the regime and its supporters blame the massacre on the rebels with an almost straight face. Even after United Nations inspectors had visited the site and filed a report, they did not resolve the question of culpability. It took an experienced reporter familiar with Syria’s civil war, my colleague C. J. Chivers, to dig into the technical information in the U.N. report and spot the evidence — compass bearings for two chemical rockets — that established the attack was launched from a Damascus redoubt of Assad’s military. “Social media isn’t journalism,” Chivers told the Boston conference. “It’s information. Journalism is what you do with it.”

The concept of citizen journalism has always bothered me. Documenting happenings and keeping people honest is one thing, but it takes a good journalist to put things in perspective, to create the context that allows us to make sense of an event. For that, and for many, many other aspects of real journalism, we need pros, now more than ever.It’s the Golden Age of News - NYTimes.com