Another example of a recently noted emerging consensus: Citizen media is about improving journalism. Jon Snow at a Guardian conference:
Citizen journalism won’t supplant professional journalism, but it may actually professionalise it. (…) There’s a sharp, exciting world there – made more exciting, more comprehensive and more vigorous in maintaining democracy by conspiring with the citizens and exposing the unprofessional media, which is what citizen media is doing all over the world.
In the same vein, Dan Gillmor on citizen journalism, amateurs and professionals – it’s not about either/or:
No one disputes that a considerable amount of what people call citizen journalism is more data than finished “product.” Why is this a problem, anyway? The citizen observer, or witness, can now get the word out to the world without having to go through the filter of the professional journalist, but it takes a certain amount of skills to thread everything together into a coherent form. Better journalists can do this especially well. It’l s not traditional gate-keeping, though, however much they might wish for that role to be uniquely theirs. It’ls a kind of guidance, not just top-down instruction, and it’ls not as easy as it sounds.