Journalists – and this may not come as a surprise – are hypocrites. We lecture the rest of the world on the urgent importance of change in everything from American foreign policy to food labelling. Yet the same journalists loathe the effort and uncertainty of change as much as anyone else; their extensive experience of recommending change does not translate into any higher skills in actually facing up to it. Journalists react to digital technology’s disruption of their industry with the same queasy resentment as any other group of professionals required to rethink what they do.

I may not be in a majority in my line of work, but I like the current technology-driven havoc precisely because journalists have to go back to first principles.

‘Journalism’ came into existence when reliable information was scarce. As newspaper publishing and distribution advanced in the nineteenth century, editors had to supply a demand for accuracy, as well as for speed and entertainment. The collective effort to be trusted came to be the distinguishing mark of journalism. (Journalism’s critics of course maintain, then and now, that whatever the stated aim, this effort was a dismal and pretentious failure).

Printing technology made journalism an oligarchy. A few people gathered, sifted and distributed what they defined as news and hoped that many people would buy it and know more of the world as a result.

Four changes turned the scarcity of public information into today’s glut: the invention of the telegraph in the nineteenth century, radio and television, digital technology such as email, and finally the internet. Digital communications not only increased the amount of easily-reached information but collapsed the hierarchy of the previous two centuries and upended traditional publishing. Anyone can now publish their thoughts, movies, books, bomb recipes, poetry at little or no cost to a global audience. Old fashioned publishing by the few to the many sits uneasily next to proliferating ‘peer-to-peer’ networks. Sometimes the two sit in the same media company.

Against this background, ‘citizen journalism’ means different things to different citizens. As a movement in media politics, citizen journalists would like to dethrone ‘mainstream media’, derisively labelled as MSM, arguing that the claims made by journalists for the trustworthiness of their work are a con trick, hiding agendas which may belong to proprietors, big business or government. Citizens empowered by democratic technology can at last bypass and expose these manipulations.

Bloggers have vastly increased the transparency of the established media by exposing errors, puncturing posturing and acting as gossip platforms for opinion that would otherwise not circulate so far so fast. These are not all citizens, in the sense of being outside media organisations; many are journalists and many of their sources are journalists.

‘Citizen journalism’ can simply mean a wider range of sources. Big events that leave media organisations flailing to get microphones and cameras to the right spots are now covered in the first few minutes and hours by a volunteer army of witnesses who send stills, audio and video from mobile phones. Where pundits and established reporters fear to tread – war zones and totalitarian states being obvious examples – the voice of the ordinary citizen blogger may be the only believable witness we have.

Never has the coverage of the planet’s human misery been so varied or so rich. The current history of the people of both Iraq and Iran is being written in thousands of cyberspace conversations. Given the brutal disapproval of the state, the scope of blogging and informal grassroots ‘media’ in China is hard to estimate; but in the end the chronicles of individual lives being written now will be a better rough draft of that country’s history than the version published in the controlled media.

If anyone can be a journalist, what is journalism?

Whatever the era and technology, journalism must surely involve an organised, persistent attempt to show what is happening, to reduce or eliminate doubt about what is the true account. That is likely to involve plural competition; enduring truth is most often established by iteration. The attempt to get at the truth may fail or may fail to be credible. It may involve opinion and analysis as well as reportage so that the truth is understood in depth and significance. It will involve judgements under pressure about veracity, insight, the public interest, and selection; we call this inexact science ‘editing’. Good editing accumulates trust; failure drains credibility away.

But anyone looking at the history of journalism will also notice that the organisations and institutions that do it are regularly being turned upside down. Two forces do this. First, journalists, often frustrated and angry ones, who find the habits and conventions that have encrusted journalism are blocking the attempt to get at the truth. American magazine reporters like Tom Wolfe in the 1960s found that the rule-bound objectivity practised by newspaper reporters quite failed to explain the social changes under way and called themselves practitioners of ‘New Journalism’. Some of the appeal of Private Eye lies in the sense that the magazine will reveal what the cautious mainstream media will dare not whisper. The French newspaper Libération was born from its young staff’s conviction that older, stuffier French journalists simply could not understand or explain the Paris riots of 1968.

The second revolutionary force is technology. Radio gave journalism a vivid immediacy it lacked. Television altered conventions again. The blend of wireless telephony, the World Wide Web, and the miniaturisation of personal technology has helped to create a glut of news information. Journalists still gathers the basic news, but must also meet the need to give it meaning and context. We analyse news in the context of instant global conversations that can involve anything from a handful of people to millions.

Advocates of citizen journalism argue that enforced ‘democratisation’ of media undermines the need for, and therefore the power of, the mainstream media. The forces of change may well bring down media empires that fail to adapt, but it does not destroy the idea of journalism. The need to know the accuracy of what you are reading or watching does not evaporate because you have a lot of new ways of finding facts and many more points of view.

The texture of the news and opinion people now consume is changing: more varied, less formal, more often more like a conversation than a lesson delivered from on high. The way in which people sample and use news and opinion is changing: they dip in and out of news all day. They can tailor emails and feeds to deliver the topics, authors and points of view of their choice.

But the business of getting accurate basic data out to consumers, of building platforms for news and opinion that people trust to be illuminating and not manipulating – that remains work of value despite the changing background. Some ‘citizen journalists’ make a real contribution to this; some don’t. It depends who they are and where they come from. In other words, we’re back where we started: making judgements about accuracy and integrity.

So I find the term ‘citizen journalist’ a misleading misnomer. All journalists are citizens; more citizens are now journalists. More voices are out there to be read and heard. Only a few will be relied on in the long term. Only so much time in every day can be given to reading or blogging; we all select the media we use. The most important question the consumer of news and opinion will ask herself or himself is the question they have always asked: do I trust this source to tell me something true and useful? Some will pass that test; some will fail. Open societies that want to stay open should keep setting that test.

George Brock is Saturday editor, The Times