I’d love to hear more about the writing coach. Let’s email.

I followed the Iran protests on FARK, because I don’t have twitter, and I recall that there were enough people following all of the tweets that the community of posters and twitterers was able to filter the ‘reliable’ (often confirmed) and ‘unreliable’ (often refuted) sources. It was amazing to be able to follow that hour to hour on twitter because of the limitations that had been placed on all other forms of news gathering there, and the fact that there was a large community of posters doing this job of critically examining and double checking the information made it, in my mind, pretty legitimate and believable.

However, as you say, anybody can write anything on twitter. I am acquainted with the fools on the internet, and I would pretty much disregard information that ame to me from twitter or facebook unless, as in the Iran situation, there was a lot of critical fact checking going on by the community, which I expect would only be the case for a major event. For normal news, really would prefer to trust sources who I know are taking time to do their homework, and not just sending out some hasty observations with all of the blanks filled in by their opinions. As you point out, the amount of time spent (habitually) by a person gathering information truly is important to their value as a source for intelligent audiences. I would trust a tweet from Anderson cooper, but not from some random unknown or even unidentified blogger.

I am just reiterating what you say, I suppose, but I thought I would give you a non-journalist’s support for your assertions. I have been excited by the spread of communication pathways, especially in the case of the Iran protests, and I get 95% of my news from online sources rather than print or TV – but I don’t think that the New York Times is going anywhere (at least I hope it isn’t, cuz I read their website for news). Don’t worry – we appreciate your work!