The topic was raised tonight at the PRCA’s Future of Content debate. You can search the Twitter hashtag #focdeb for conversation from the event.

The panel debated whether user generated content could ever replace traditional journalism, which led very quickly to a discussion about trusted sources.

But I think that misses the point.

Yes Twitter has rolled over numerous injunctions and broken major news stories such as the death of Bin Laden. But for every example of where Twitter has broken a story there are countless where it is used to push propaganda.

There’s a reason that the quote, attributed to twentieth century US progressive and politician Hiram Johnson, “that truth is the first casualty of war” is a cliché. It is an accurate observation and applies as much to today era of user generate content as it did in the 1900s when Johnson is claimed to have first delivered the infamous soundbite.

Here’s Mary Beth Sheridan citing a recent example of this issue last month in The Washington Post.

For weeks, Syrian democracy activists have used Facebook and Twitter to promote a wave of bold demonstrations. Now, the Syrian government and its supporters are striking back — not just with bullets but also with their own social-media offensive.

Mysterious intruders have scrawled pro-government messages on dissidents’ Facebook pages. Facebook pages have popped up offering cyber-tools to attack the opposition. The Twitter hashtag Syria — a label that had been used for accounts of the protests — has been deluged with automated messages bearing scenes of nature and old sports scores.

“There is a war itself going on in cyberspace,” said Wissam Tarif, head of the Middle East human-rights organization Insan, whose website has been attacked.

User generated content may have a role alongside the reporting for news events. But it is easily manipulated for good and bad, and can never replace the integrity of professional journalism.

The internet has torn down all barriers to publishing. Undoubtedly that is good for democracy.  But at a time when anyone can become a publisher, the skills of a journalist in closing the gap between the source and the story, and rigorous fact checking are more critical than ever.

New digital media entrants, without the shackles of a print business, have shown that it is possible to build a business model to support professional journalism, and some traditional media organisations are making efforts to build sustainable models.

The business model to support professional journalism is changing, but it’s not dead and crucially neither is professional journalism.

Photo: Rubble at Quneitra, Syria (watchsmart via Flickr).

In its current guise hyperlocal journalism is either an experiment by the large regional publishers such as Trinity Mirror’s Your Place network in the North East, or is the pursuit of freelancers as part of a portfolio career.

Sources of funding are limited. Online readers almost certainly won’t pay for local news and Google’s adword network is not sufficiently granular to stretch to a post code area and is overly complex.

It’s why I think Addiply’s hyperlocal ad network is compelling. It makes advertising as simple as posting an ad in a newsagent. And that’s important for local businesses with limited technical expertise.

The Addiply team has a two-fold strategy: it is brokering deals with regional media groups and individuals that run hyperlocal blogs at the same time as pre-loading its ad network by pulling in national advertisers seeking to roll our regional campaigns.

At the point that Addiply reaches near nationwide coverage and is able to offer hyperlocal bloggers a startup package of guaranteed inventory to run on their sites from launch, it will have created a compelling business model for hyperlocal sites.

If you’re interested in exploring business models for the future of media head to the North East of England.

That’s the call of Rick Waghorn who has written an excellent summary of the numerous projects in the region that are exploring aspects of content creation, delivery and financial models.

“If anyone wants to know where the future of the UK’s new media landscape will be forged and decided, it’ll be in the North-East of England. […] Whether by accident or design [it is a] very interesting place to be now media-wise,” says Waghorn.

Hyper local network
Trinity Mirror has created the Your Place network of 22 hyperlocal blogs fed by local bloggers and journalists the length and breadth of Northumberland. I’m an occasional contributor to my local site in the Rothbury area

Meanwhile Josh Halliday (@JoshHalliday), an ambitious journalism student at the University of Sunderland, has launched SR2, a stylishly produced site dedicated to reporting about the SR2 postcode area of Sunderland. He is aiming to go ad funded to cover costs

Ad model
Trinity Mirror has recently opened up its Your Place project to an ad network called Addiply. It enables businesses to set up an ad campaign for a specific geographical audience for £5 per week.

Pay walls
The Northumberland Gazette is one of six weekly regionals in the Johnston Press stable that will disappear behind a paywall in a trial that starts on Monday. Will readers sign-up and pay online? I doubt it, but it will be interesting to watch.

Peston had the opportunity to formally respond when he delivered the Richard Dunn Memorial Lecture the following afternoon, although he claims in the text of his speech that he didn’t alter the text following Murdoch’s blast at the BBC.

Peston made four points in his speech called ‘What future for media and journalism’:

• The traditional business model of news providers is broken and needs to be “overhauled”
• In a 24/7 digital world, individual news organisation may be less powerful than they were, but content and its creators are king
• Digital requires journalists to work multi-channel – TV, radio, online and print
• Democracy demands “a choice of high-quality news providers which are confident in their ability to explain complex important issues in a clear and accessible way”

No one in the media industry could find fault with the first three points. The fourth forms the genesis of the row between Murdoch and Peston. But even here Peston appears to find common ground with Murdoch.

[…] I completely understand why James Murdoch has argued that the BBC’s online news service looks like state-subsidised unfair competition. Much of the private sector sees the BBC as crowding out legitimate commercial players.

But Peston has a counter argument. He says that while a fair commercial market is important, so too is the fair distribution of knowledge and information. “Should we be relaxed if ‘can’t pay’ means ‘can’t know’?” he said.

Its an argument that returns to the core tenents of the BBC Charter.

“As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion,” he said. The next 18 months will almost certainly see the closure of a number of major national and regional titles close. Circulation and ad revenues are falling.

Newspapers need to start charging for their content on the web. But in the short term this could hasten their demise driving traffic to sites that don’t charge notably the BBC.

“Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,” said Murdoch.

The BBC is distorting the market for online news as it will never charge for its content because of its funding structure.

The full text of the MacTaggart lecture is posted on Broadcast’s web site.

Details of how the mobile phones of people in the public eye were allegedly “hacked” by journalists at News of the World as reported by the Guardian today remain undisclosed. But one of the questions any ongoing investigation will no doubt ask include whether what is claimed to have happened was hacking per se, and whether it broke any laws.

Without making any inference whatsoever on the allegations currently facing individuals at the News of the World, here are some possible ways that an individual could conceivably, if they were so minded, get information from mobile phone services:

• Bug on the handset – unlikely that anyone would go this far and difficult to implement en masse anyway
• An intercept during the conversation – difficult and expensive, requiring military-level expertise
• Phone company insider – paid to listen-in or record calls, or provide access to voice packets or voicemail files
• Voicemail hacking – each network has a default voicemail pin. If you don’t change your pin, your messages could be hacked anytime your phone is switched off or you miss a call. You could call this hacking, but it could be viewed as the equivalent to leaving a window open

Two things surprise me about this case: how quick other publishers have been to turn on News International, publisher of The News of the World, The Sun and The Times, and that journalists at the News of the World would risk using such a tactic after seeing a colleague and private investigator jailed for a separate but phone-related incident in 2007.

I’ve explored this model before – journalists and editors as coaches to amateurs, sharpening content and acting as a filter. I’m a contributor to one such project in the North East.

Anderson is the managing editor of Wired, a publication that like many others has extended its online presence to include contributions from enthusiastic domain experts.

Anderson said that it’s not uncommon for stories contributed by bloggers to get more traffic than those submitted by journalists.

But Wired doesn’t typically pay its non-journalist contributors. Anderson reckons that the reputation and audience is reward enough. He said that he has never had any complaints and has plenty of people keen to sign-up.

It’s freeconomics in action. Except that it isn’t. It is simply exchanging one form of reward (money) with another (profile). As Broadstuff’s Alan Patrick says the contributor still needs a day job to pay their bills.

“The Day Job! Of course! Yes, the Day Job is what earns the Real Money. You then use your Free Time to make Free Stuff to sell on the Free World. But if your Day Job is making stuff that people that people are making for free, then what?“

This model works for now but it is wholly reliant on the editorial team as custodians of the Wired brand. As soon as standards slip the audience and contributors will follow.

My personal view is that journalism is misunderstood. Robert G. Picard, an authority on the economics of media says:

“It is not a business model; it is not a job; it is not a company; it is not an industry; it is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform. Instead journalism is an activity. It is a body of practises by which information and knowledge is gathered, processed and conveyed. […]“

A trained journalist can turn their hand to any story. A domain expert is limited to their personal area of expertise. And then there are good writers and bad.

Education is a critical. Writing style is one issue, but beyond that few bloggers have an awareness of the more sensitive areas of reporting such as copyright, citation, court reporting, defamation, reporting death, fact checking and second sourcing.

By paying limited attention to these journalistic tenets, bloggers risk dressing opinion and speculation up as fact, or worst making a legal blunder. When errors inevitably attract comment or criticism, corrections are made on the fly.

This argument was played out in the New York Times in early June by Damon Darlin who accused bloggers of taking a publish-and-be-damned approach. He received a harsh rebuttal from the blogliterati including Michael Arlington and Jeff Jarvis.

Alan Patrick calls it real time news processing (publish in real time) versus the old model of batch processing (to hit a print deadline).

“[…] what is going on here is not journo vs blogger per se. After all, journos have a few news-churning ploys of their own. It’s more a shift of media, from paper to broadband.“

Jeff Jarvis celebrates so-called beta journalism and calls time on journalism as we know it.

“Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfectation. […] It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can.”

Journalism. But not as we know it.

I’m onboard as a community correspondent on the Your Place project in the North East developed by the Trinity Mirror-owned Newcastle Journal. It’s created a network of 22-regional micro sites each of which are fed with content by local bloggers.

As a contributor I’ve been provided with a set of content guidelines and invited to post local news and information.

Northumberland editor Graeme Whitfield provides a light editorial touch and readers are encouraged to comment on posts and submit their own content.

Each micro-site each carries sponsored links, local ads and Google ads. It’s a smart model that returns regional media to its grassroots embedded within communities.

Could the Journal founded in 1852 be developing the new model for regional media?