Throughout the credit crunch and associated growing crises, I have become a real fan of the BBC's Robert Peston. It is not just his curious delivery style or the punishing schedule he has maintained for the past few weeks, but the fact that he tries so hard to chart a truthful course through what is a highly complex and multi-faceted set of issues, as his recent Guardian interview suggests.

For two years he was a lone voice arguing that Northern Rock's meteoric rise was actually a harbinger of doom, and he rightly own awards for breaking the story of the bank's collapse. He also broke the HBOS merger story and this week even offered an imaginative solution for the UK that would enable banks to avoid collapse whilst providing an upside for the taxpayer over the long run. Compared to more ideologically-blind US coverage, much of which looks like coverage of a sports event, Peston is both insightful and entertaining:

"...all the wealth that has accumulated in China, in the Middle East, and Russia - that shifts the balance of financial power massively in their direction. I mean, if the Chinese got their act together, and they wanted to, they could actually, at this moment, buy the entire US banking system. They could just buy it. Which is an extraordinary thing - it's something that none of us could have predicted a few years ago"

He's also a blogger, of course, as are many good journalists these days. His blog is one of the very best on the BBC blog network - even managing to attract a remarkably sentient following among commenters. The fact that the very best blog about the crisis - by a long way - is an official BBC (mainstream media) blog should give us pause for thought when we argue that social media and citizen reporting is THE way forward. What individual blogger would be able to chase the Northern Rock story for two years, or have the level of access and trust that brings Peston some of his best stories?

There are some brilliant small blogs out there pursuing niche topics, and hopefully they will both feed and be fed by some of the better mainstream media over time, but right now a lot of the purely blog-based media (Valleywag, TechCrunch, etc) are vacuous gossip rags compared to a blog like Peston's Picks. Apologies if that sounds counter-revolutionary ;-)

Elsewhere, this week saw an example of how un-filtered citizen "reporting" can be dangerous, when various blogs (including a CNN property) carried a rumour that Apple's Steve Jobs had suffered a major heart attack. Apple's share price, which I happened to be watching at the time (ahem) went through the floor until the rumour was refuted.

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones touched on the dilemma this kind of event represents for mainstream media:

This kind of rumour would never be published or aired without checking by a major newspaper or broadcaster. But mainstream media organisations - including the BBC - are all under pressure to have a more open relationship with their readers and viewers, to prove that they "get" the Web 2.0 world.

Meanwhile, the editor of the Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget, who carried the story with much in the way of fact checking, continues to defend his publication's role despite an SEC inquiry that suggests this may have been an attempt to manipulate the market.

Not such a good week for citizen journalism, all told.