Famous Journalists?

Are independent, professional journalists necessary for a free press and functioning democracy, or are citizen journalists sufficient?

• "Independent" journalists are those not controlled by a government or by a non-media corporation (e.g. corporate publicists, not reporters employed by a publication. In the future, will citizen journalists replace professional ones?

• Answer:

  Citizen journalists don't have the scale or resources for a number of key issues: Citizen journalists generally don't have the time or resource to cover in depth on 30 different issues a day. (Newspapers run on 10 million versus citizen journalism running on around $500 to $25k a year) Citizen journalists don't have the same distribution larger newspapers have (5k to 7k hits a day isn't exactly distribution compared to larger newspapers.  So at best they might have 1/10, 1/100, or 1/1000 of the distribution). Probably don't collaborate enough (most citizen journalists are probably armies' of one versus newspapers like NYT & the Chicago Tribune, and the LA Times with far more resources) Citizen journalists have to rely on mass media for much of their information--at least of the political variety (NYT, Washington Post, etc...).  This allows citizen journalists to report from afar.  Essentially, in some respects the mainstream media makes some citizen journalists job easier.