[catone]

The problems with Carr's piece are:

1. That he points out a problem with mainstream journalism (failing to vet sources), not one with citizen journalism, as he says. (Note: citizen journalism has that problem too, but not here.)

2. His definition of "citizen journalism" is far too wide, in my opinion. Moore isn't a citizen journalist. She's just a person who happened to be talking to her friends about an event as it happened.

If we accept the "everyone is now a journalist" definition that Carr seems to use, then journalism becomes something of very little value. Journalism is removing the signal from the noise, and his first example (Moore) demonstrates a failure on the part of trained journalists to do that properly.

His second example (the video of the Iranian protesters death) is tragic, but again, not a failure of journalism or journalists. It's a failure of human decency, perhaps (and one that's certainly debatable)... but that's another topic altogether.

[axod]

Surely his point wasn't that 'citizen journalism' is bad, but that sorting the signal from the noise is extremely hard, and no one has really solved that yet. Certainly not twitter.

Also the other point that I got was that people are often more interested in whipping out their camera/twitter client/etc than actually helping/enjoying something/participating etc.

Personally I thought those two points were valid and worth making. Also thought it a bit sad that pg killed the discussion on HN, because I think it would have been interesting.

[catone]

I'll grant you the second point, though I think you developed it further in once sentence here than Carr did in his piece. (By which I mean to say, the correlation between that observed phenomena and the rise in emphasis on citizen journalism may be valid, and would have fit with the topic Carr was editorializing on, but he didn't do a very good job developing that supposed link.)

But to the former, I don't think Carr was trying to say citizen journalism is bad, but I do think he was trying to say it often fails us. Unfortunately (for his argument), the example he picked was one of a citizen's voice (not a citizen journalist's) being amplified by a mainstream press that had failed to properly vet those reports. So that failing was with the traditional media, rather than new media, imho.