This is both their greatest strength (It is impossible to hide anything for long) and their greatest liability (the rush to judgement can be breathtakingly fast).

Given the time necessary for information to sift through it, though, I think it is fairly reliable.

It seems that the mainstream networks have become so quick in their own rush to judgement, that they themselves, in an effort to 'scoop' other networks, find themselves retracting information on the fly.

So for me, it seems that journalism that stems from reliable sources is becoming just as reliable as the network sources...

to everyone. This strikes me as a strength.

If what they're saying is correct it will be verified.

like what The Buffalo Beast's Ian Murphy pulled on Scott Walker. Just imagine how much damage we could do to the Republicans if everyone at DU devoted a bit of their energy to taking Righties down a notch.

the individual journalist. MSM on the other hand has different organizations with different levels of credibility. So, in order to judge individual citizen journalists, you need to have an idea of how credible their sources are and have good idea what their track record is.

and the more surprising the claim and/or the more important the information, the more skeptically I approach it and the more confirmation I need.

My general observation is that there is a much wider range of quality in the citizen journalism realm, compared to the professional: it can be as good or better, but it can also be spectacularly bad. Professional journalism tends to have a tighter clustering at the good end of the scale...

Depends.

Some citizen journos will do due diligence and develop sources and ...pound the streets. This is also a critical part of journalism. Any good journo needs to develop those sources and those beats...matters little if you call it citizen journo or not.

Then there is the other type...doing is by what I call seat of pants, trolling others work on line and never, ever doing the hard work of walking the streets, covering forums, and developing sources.

I have seen both types, I got very little respect for the latter, who rarely, if ever, goes and talks to real people.

Also having an editor helps to give you a reality check, even if at times it can be frustrating.

As to some media sources, I both beware and use the twitter, for example. It can be great, if you have a reliable feed...and pitfall ridden if you don't...same can be said about FB and the rest of the social sphere.

Does this make any sense?

reality should know that there are no good corporate news sources left in the U.S., period.

There are a few that occasionally publish stories that I like or find interesting or amusing, but the content of relevant truth regarding what is going on, why it is going on, and who is doing it approaches a value so close to zero as to be insignificant. So we have a news media so thoroughly corrupt that the best and most dedicated journalists have to leave the country to find outlets for their work.

So we are left with professional pitch-people that are handsomely paid to sell us whatever their masters want to sell, and a collection of amateurs toiling away for next to nothing and creating something so not journalistic that they had to invent a name to differentiate it. Their talents as writers runs the whole spectrum, from nearly illiterate to astonishing, but they are not journalists in the sense that they are dispassionate reporters of news. Quite the contrary, they are frequently consumed with passion which can make for entertaining, enraging, hopeful, despairing pieces, but it's not reporting.

The schools of journalism are mostly filled with young hotties, of both sexes, who's ambitions are nothing more than to land a gig and make a million shilling for whomever is willing to pay, and those writing the checks will dictate what they will and won't talk about.

Those of us that listened to Rachel Maddow's radio show, long before anybody had heard of her, have seen the dramatic change in her since she landed that great gig on the General Electric/Microsoft network. She does what she can when she can, but she will never be allowed to go too far, or if she does, she will be gone.

I'm not sure that this is really an answer unless the answer is that there really is no answer, nor really such a thing as a citizen journalist.