There are so many places to get good information now.

And I think that news organizations have changed.

One of the problems for journalists is how do we stand out?

How do we get our journalism and good journalism to float to the top?

Journalists who really excel at Twitter are those who recognize that it's not just a promotional platform but really as a global conversation.

News is constant.

It's a never-ending flow.

It has no beginning.

It has no end.

We have to break out of this idea that news is a once-a-day product.

We have to get out of this idea all we do is make content in the form of articles.

We can do much more than that.

Instead, we have to think of journalism as an ecosystem.

When Twitter came along, journalists got it pretty quickly.

And they understood first that it was a vehicle for self-promotion.

Then they started to realize that they could use Twitter to report and say, well, this is what I know.

What do you know?

What do you want to know?

Who should I talk to?

It became a mechanism for collaboration.

And now, suddenly, they had of voice.

If you look at Andy Carvin in the Arab Spring, the flow of information on the Arab Spring was going on without media.

Andy saw that.

And he added journalistic value to it.

He debunked rumors.

He asked people to crowdsource with him and translate videos.

He added context, and so on and so on, and so on.

We're still assuming that journalism is about making a product.

And I think it's more about performing a service.

And we, as journalists, have to ask when and how we add value to that.

In the beginning, a lot of journalists saw Twitter as a threat.

They were like, oh, there's this huge source of information.

Am I going to get put out of a job?

Is Twitter going to take over?

And really Twitter and journalism go hand in hand.

Twitter is a source of information.

Because Twitter doesn't have any sort of editorial staff and there's no filter, it has a very different role from what journalists have which is to be that filter.

Journalists are great at analyzing information and synthesizing it.

What does that mean in a historical context?

Now news is a 24-hour cycle.

That means they need to be on top of the news.

You really have to start developing a story as it's going along.

The great thing about Twitter is that it is self correcting.

In the past, you would have maybe one or two sources confirming something.

Now you have a global resource that can help you fact check your process.

It really is an ecosystem of news.

So journalists shouldn't see Twitter as a threat.

They should see it as a helping hand on the road towards creating better news.

We need journalists because on social media, if we keep surrounding ourselves around like-minded voices and our friends and our family, that's going to be all the information we get.

And it kind of shapes your worldview based on your social media connections.

Social media, it's useful in a number of ways for journalists.

But you have to worry about not having certain editors saying this is important and this is not important.

If the people truly have the power over what is news and what is not, that's going to be a very different landscape.

People, in general, are interested in things like celebrities and things that are funny.

They're interested in what's going on right here in the United States but maybe not as much in the world.

It's almost scary how often we're saying round-ups now that this is what people are saying on Twitter.

This is what people are saying on Facebook.

And I have to ask this question, though.

Is it actually newsworthy?

Another thing we forget that's really important is that there are a lot of people who are not on Facebook and Twitter.

And their voices are not being heard.

So I think for journalists the important thing is that we filter through all the noise and surface the most important things.

If you worked in a newsroom 20 years ago, most people consumed information, and they consumed the information that you produced if they consumed information at all.

I think all of sudden journalists are kind of face to face with the fact lots of people are speaking all at once.

There isn't just one way to be a journalist anymore.

And the one advantage that younger generations have over older generations is not that they know more.

It's simply that they have less to unlearn.

Determining the veracity of something on Twitter is obviously a lot different that determining whether a government official is telling you something that's true or not.

It's hard to change your habits after you've had them for a while.

So I think that we tend to mythologize how good news reporting used to be in the past.

And it's not entirely how it was.

So we need to keep that in mind.

There isn't always a golden age.

And sometimes we can hurt ourselves by imagining that there was.

In journalism there are isolated pockets of people who have stories to tell.

Twitter really enables them to rise to the top.

There are so many voices out there.

And we need somebody to say this is factual information, or this is what you need to know.

I don't know if news organizations can honestly make the argument that we're sort of the best anymore.

It's not about having professional journalists and citizen journalists and paid people and unpaid people.

Acts of journalism can be performed by anyone.

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