User-generated content is frequently cited as both the death and the saviour of traditional journalism. For news organisations facing increasing competition for both readers and amateurs the thought of free content can be very tempting; for the professional journalists employed by that news organisation to see all this material being created by amateurs can be a worrying development. Ironically, it is the sheer volume of amateur content that makes the journalists’ job so important. It is possible to follow the hashtag of a news event on Twitter and get some idea of what is happening, but anyone who has done that knows that the sheer volume of tweets can be intimidating and overwhelming to anyone trying to find out the information that is relevant to them. Once you filter out the tweets that reference professional news content, you are left with a haphazard and chaotic collection of comment, observation and unverified eyewitness reports. The journalist is needed to make sense of that chaos, to select and verify information, to structure it into a cohesive whole, to link it with other research, other information provided by professional and institutional sources, and to make sense of it.

The journalist’s role has changed, yes, especially becoming more transparent, but the function within society, that of making sense of the events that happen, of selecting, sorting and making meaningful the chaos of life, that has not.