democracy or oblivion?

Manchester International Festival held a debate on the future of journalism today, which asked whether the rise of blogging and "citizen media" is rendering professionals obsolete.
I pretty much switched off while the woman from the BBC was talking but was quite interested in what the other two panelists had to say.
Georgina Henry, Guardian comment editor and launch editor of Comment is Free, was predictably enthusiastic about the whole idea of "democratising the debate", although not unreservedly so.
She described the challenge of moderating the hundreds of comments they get every day on their threads, for example.
She said they frequently get accused of inciting racial and religious hatred through them, and believes one day someone probably will try to sue them for libel. She sees this broadening of participation as complementing - not replacing - what the professionals do.
Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was more circumspect. She made the distinction between authoritarian regimes and war zones like Iraq, where blogs have become a vital way of getting news out, and societies like Britain - and argues that there should be limits to all freedom in terms of people's conduct.
She talked about the viciousness of some people when they leave comments, write emails or pen bile on the net, and seemed to be saying these changes are eroding respect for the work done by professional journalists.
She also used to example of how she had been targeted because she is a liberal Muslim and married to a Catholic. Her daughter has been followed to school and people write that she deserves to be killed.
I was torn between the two viewpoints. I agree with Yasmin that the anonymity of the internet can be a bad thing, and it seems to me that people who comment on sites like CIF can be flippant and make personal attacks on writers and other commenters.
But I also agree with Georgina that to survive, the mainstream media has to adapt and embrace as far as possible these new areas of media.
I do have concerns however about the reliability of what is out there. That's not to say I believe the media should be elitist and only for professionals - just that it is far too easy for lies, conspiracy theories and legally problematic pieces to be put "out there" and take on a life of their own. I guess most people already know to take a lot of what's available with a healthy dose of salt though.
It did seem slightly strange, however, given the subject matter of this debate, that their panel contained only members who were trained journalists from the mainstream media.
It probably would have made sense to have featured some kind of new media evangelist who has purely made their name through blogging, for example.