[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.