As the government infiltrates more of Americans’ lives, traditional journalists are battling new media rather than a surveillance state:
But this is about far more than just the NSA story: beneath the surface — and increasingly above the surface — what we are seeing is an immune-system response from the journalism establishment, or what Clay Shirky has called the “shock of inclusion” caused by the rise of a networked fourth estate….
Media theorist Clay Shirky described this phenomenon in a 2010 essay, in which he called this kind of response from the media establishment the “shock of inclusion.” His examples were things like the use of Twitter as a reporting tool for citizen journalists during the demonstrations in Iran, and the London bombings of 2005, but his overall point is the same: that the media industry is struggling to handle the same onslaught of “user-generated content” as many other industries (such as the photography business), and it is mostly failing.
Via The shock of inclusion: Why the NSA story has turned journalist against journalist .