CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter and the author of two books: The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

This moment in the history of journalism is like being present at the Big Bang, and reality has turned inside out. Mighty and once-monolithic outlets are going poof! into black holes, and the news business itself is disintegrating into a million little pieces. Meanwhile, an audience which used to consist of billions of individuals is congealing into one gigantic, sticky web of social network associations, incessantly texting and Tweeting.   
I get cosmic thoughts like these a lot these days, thanks to one of my gigs. As freelancers do, I move from 0one project to the next, and one of my side projects at the moment (aside from a book some editor in New York keeps pestering me about) involves compiling a daily news summary for the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland. It’s a gig that’s coming to an end soon, and I’ll miss it. Partly this is because I’ve grown attached to the income stream, and partly it’s because it will deprive me of my last excuse to avoid book writing and research. (Hey! I have to look at this MSNBC thing on the 700-pound woman, do ya mind?) But mainly I’ll miss it it’s because it’s taught me so much.
Every morning, I cruise somewhere between 40 and 60 websites—print, broadcast, radio, online magazines, blogs, podcasts, whatever—to see what kind of topics are out there that relate to the general business of “caregiving” and its intersection with public policy. It’s a bewildering daily mosaic of images. And though “mosaic” is the only way to describe the journalism business these days, certain broad themes do emerge.
First, and unavoidably, there’s the whole “death of print” aspect. In the brief time I’ve been doing this, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has ceased print publication, the Rocky Mountain News is but a memory, the Boston Globe is up for sale, the Washington Post is shrinking so fast I expect to see it soon under my windshield wiper as an informational flyer—and the Post in great shape, terrific shape, compared to the New York Times. (The New York Times! Sorry—I have to breathe into a paper bag for a sec.) My 20-something years in newspapers comes back to me now as a series of mental images, with John Prine’s “Flashback Blues” as the soundtrack: “Photographs show the laughs/recorded in between the bad times/Happy sailors, dancin’ on a sinking ship.” The whole process seems to be accelerating so fast that I hardly have time to feel sad. It gives me the same feeling of disbelief I felt on 9/11, and the same oddly detached thought: wow, this is really interesting.
The second big theme is the flowering of other media outlets—a new one, it seems, every other week. I hesitate to mention them by name because doing so will reveal my ignorance of four more I’ve missed which are way more important, but here goes with two I’ve noticed recently: The Root, a website which provides black perspectives on current events, and FLYP, which as near as I can tell is the 21st multi-media answer to the old Life magazine—covering news, politics, science and the arts, with pictures. Both are terrific websites, from what I’ve seen so far. This flowering of these new outlets is a great thing to see; I fervently wish them well—and not for just high-minded reasons, mind you, but because one day maybe a few of them will start making enough money that they will give me some of it.  
Finally, I’m seeing a lot of really good, in-depth reporting from non-profits and think tanks. When I was still in a daily newsroom a decade ago, I regularly saw reports from think tanks and non-profits, and aside from having horribly clunky leads and leaden prose, they often used untold hours and way too many trees to prove things everybody already knew. (My favorite was the glossy report from some graduate program at Harvard, which exposed the shocker that poor people had trouble finding affordable housing because they lacked income.) Today, while I can’t cite statistics, it seems to me that the reports are a lot less clunky and a lot more topical. I also don’t think it’s an accident that I frequently see among the authors the name of a former colleague. Obviously, the non-profit world has noticed the enormous number of unemployed journalists out there—people who are enormously talented at ferreting out complicated information and making sense of it quickly—and they have put a lucky few of them to good use. The leads are still clunky, but for the most part this arrangement is benefitting everybody, not least the public.
Ah, the public. Who is going to read those intelligently researched and insightful reports, now that the number of mainstream media outlets is disappearing and the ones that are left are hanging on by their toenails? We’ll post them on the Internet, you say. Yeah, right. These days merely posting something on the Internet is like flinging a handful of sand into the Milky Way. Given the sheer number of blogs and personal websites out there, I can’t escape the nagging fantasy that somewhere out there is a blogger who has figured out cold fusion and could solve the world’s energy crisis this week, but who just can’t attract a readership of more than two digits. I don’t know if this fantasy is paranoid or hopeful, or both.
It’s no surprise that as this media Big Bang continues, it’s increasingly hard to get an accurate Big Picture. Instead what we have is a pixilated panoply of images. Information consumers (I hate that term, but talking about “readers” and “viewers” denotes an increasingly artificial distinction) compile their own tailor-made list of websites, chosen from hundreds of potential ones, which they check out for news on whatever subject is dear to their hearts: health care, say, or  firearms regulation. They have a whole different set for political news, and the political website galaxy is further subdivided on a very long Rush Limbaugh-to-Amy-Goodman spectrum, which means it’s so big you can’t see from one end to the other. Then there are the neighborhood listserves to find out about a local bank robbery or a traffic jam. Foreign news? There, tradition still reigns: most Americans still ignore it, even though it’s more accessible than ever—unless, of course, they have relatives overseas. In that case they may subscribe to a BBC feed, or al-Jazeera, or Agence France-Presse, whatever they need for news about one particular region or country.  
It’s silly to try to label these changes as “good” or “bad.” They’re just tools; Guttenberg brought us Shakespeare’s sonnets and Larry Flynt’s Hustler. No, what I keep coming back to is this inversion thing—this concept of an exploding number of outlets and a steadily congealing audience, connected in one gigantic sticky web. What will that lead to? Already, it’s clear that the kind of networking and instant communication afforded by Internet pose a deadly threat to repressive regimes everywhere; China’s leaders are having to devote considerable time and energy trying to construct the internet version of the Great Wall, trying to keep out news they consider dangerous or destabilizing. On the other hand, the Internet is a wonderful way for white supremacist or neo-Nazi groups around the world to stay in touch, too.
I wish I could come up with something smart to say about what all this means, or maybe astound us all with a new business model for journalism, but I’m as confused as most everybody else. The only thing that’s clear to me is that, given the increasingly powerful possibilities of this chaotic media universe, content matters more than ever. In 1962, if NBC News broadcast something in error, it could put out a gigantic correction the next day; life in these United States would go on, and people in Sri Lanka would never hear about it. These days, one small piece of misinformation can go globally viral in a matter of seconds, and the Hong Kong stock market can tumble from one misplaced piece of gossip. Corrections? Good luck with that. Merely tracking any piece of information back to its source is often a job that can outwit the geniuses at the National Security Administration.
What this means is that more than ever, it’s incumbent on anybody practicing journalism to get it right. Yeah, I know, that sounds painfully obvious and even preachy, but in a world where scoops are counted in milliseconds, it bears repeating. The basic qualification for surviving all these changes—aside from smarts, money and luck—will be whether you can put out information people can trust. Accuracy, in the end, will matter more than speed. It always has. We are tracking uncharted territory, and new skills are needed. But so is so old-fashioned gear: concepts like verification, and relevance, and remembering where our real and ultimate loyalties lie. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by. Especially when it’s going by at warp speed.

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