Like a case of early menopause, you can never be quite sure when a bout of journalistic self-analysis will break out.

And now we, as a profession, are half-asleep, leaning into an open fridge, against a bag of frozen peas at 2am, trying to cool our flashes of existential fear.

Get it right? Get it fast? Trust Reddit? Report it on Twitter? Relay scanner chatter? Work with Anonymous?

The only constant, reassurance in a stream of otherwise unstable hormones, is that we’ve confirmed how awful CNN is. That, we’ve decided, is not what we want to do. On the flip-side, we’ve realized how amazing local papers — like the Boston Globe — can be. That, we’re sure, is what we want to be.

But aside from that?

We’re as confused as we ever were.

Let’s rewind to last week.

Two explosions go off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Disarray ensues. It becomes quickly evidence that this was no gas line explosion — this is a terrorist bombing.

But there’s a tension in that interim. Reporters may have been on-scene and nearby, but they weren’t nearly equipped to report on something of that magnitude. Certainly, none of them had footage of the bombing. But there were hundreds of citizen journalists, dozens with video of the blasts, who began cutting out the middleman and sending them straight to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (aside: when the President of Chechnya released a statement on the attacks, he did it via Instagram.) Suddenly, you’re a CNN producer with nothing but speculation to run, as the story unfolds via Twitter. The worst nightmare. A reality.

And networks are not the only ones struggling. With news unfolding so fast, the papers can only offer vague retrospectives and boisterous coverage images for their print editions — you know, the things that make them money. Their reporting ended up either being remarkably conservative, or outlandish and speculative — see: the New York Post. Web editors offered a curated view of Twitter and online discussions, but — the Boston Globe aside — rarely added much value in terms of on-the-ground reporting.

Here in Canada, our outlets were slow to send reporters — opting, often, for staff over local. Some didn’t know what to do (Sun News ran Ezra Levant’s show as the second suspect was captured.) Most were deliberate and thoughtful, albeit caught flatfooted.

Meanwhile, the non-traditional media like Reddit, facing its supposed big test of being a investigative news brain, fingered the wrong suspects out of the gate and gave credence to a lot of the hang-wringing over deputizing an ornery mob as seasoned journalists.

So the medium that was supposed to break the news, couldn’t, the format that is supposed to enhance the news, didn’t, and the new kid on the block that was supposed to revolutionize news delivery, failed.

It seems like a sad state. You have “BAG MEN,” the two unlucky sods who were singled out — wrongly — by the Post in an act of fantastically unscrupulous journalism. Or the multitude of clusterfuckgaffes by CNN — from Jon King reading from his phone on-air that they caught the suspect (when they didn’t) or the “it feels like a bomb has dropped” snafu — it just didn’t feel like a good week for journalism.

The count-weight was local reporting. WCVB, a local ABC affiliate, stood out as some of the more level-headed, clever coverage of the manhunt. The Boston Globe, of course, had a mix of reputable witnesses from on-the-ground, intrepid reporters and a keen eye for what to report, and what to withhold until it was verified.

But what’s the take-away? I’ve prepared a list.

• Don’t put your anchors in the street. For fuck’s sake, CNN, having Jon King and Wolf Blitzer on a street corner is like assigning the Hardy Boys to solve a murder in the Congo. King and Blitzer should be giant, overly made-up, filters. They should be throwing to reporters on the street, not standing on the road and reading their Blackberries. You’re not edgy. Stop trying.

• Twitter is about curation. Consider this tale of two Twitters: during the daring shoot-out between the brothers and the police, media were nowhere nearby, and they weren’t even able to get close if they tried. Virtually all of the news came by way of a handful of Twitter-users who happened to live in the buildings nearby. One even managed to get footage of the firefight. Those defacto reporters were added to Twitter lists and Storified, and used as primary source material for journalists. That’s swell. But here’s the second tale — in the wee hours, the night after the firefight, Twitter picked up on some scanner feed. Cops were reading out a man’s name, and there was some confusion as to his involvement. Soon thereafter, a tweet surfaced, naming him and a second man as the suspects police were after. Except they weren’t. It was bad reporting from a nobody, who — for some reason — got picked up. That’s all to say that Twitter is an unwieldy beast, and feeding speculative reporting only gets more speculative reporting. I admit that I was, at first, sceptical about the two men who were reported as suspects, but later joined the bandwagon once outlets I trusted began mentioning their names.

• Police scanners are bad … kind of. I tuned into the scanner during the shoot-out, and for the ensuing manhunt. At first, there was a sort of self-policing going on for Twitter — my feed, anyway. Tweeters wouldn’t relay cop locations, and stuck to reporting broad strokes or critical information (they had someone in custody, they released someone, explosive thrown, etc.) But that broke down. I started seeing locations, police movements, planned tactics, the whole shebang. Despite exasperated pleas from hardened journalists who know a thing or two about sitting around a scanner, it kept going. Later, the police force would request that Twitter turn off the scanners. By an large, the next night, it worked. Despite Twitter’s penchant for jamming its finger onto the big red button marked ‘do not press,’ chatter from the scanner was much quieter during the younger Tsarnaev’s arrest. Did they smarten up? Hard to tell. But it is worth considering this — police scanner apps are available for most smartphones. It wouldn’t be tough for any criminal element to plug in an earbud and stay a step ahead of the 5-0, which would prove much easier than scrolling through Twitter to find someone tweeting police locations. But even still, there’s no doubting that the adrenaline-fuelled events that beget high listenership on scanners lead to a general ratcheting up of hysteria and speculation. Piping a scanner into a newsroom allows journos to keep on top of a story, but diffusing the message to the population releases the floodgates and gives a channel for the speculation and idle cop chatter to pour into the mainstream and sow confusion. There’s talk of encrypting the traffic, which might not be a bad idea.

• The ‘get it first’ vs. ‘get it right’ debate needs to stop being a dichotomy. Consider this: CNN got it wrong, first, and got it right, last. The Globe got it right when they got it, and still managed to get some things right, first. In the era of hyper-connectivity, nobody actually cares if you get it right first — they probably already had it before you, anyway. For all of the corporate media’s mantra about taking the time to do it right, they often rush to catch up with online chatter, adding virtually nothing to the information flood. Rather than spend their time chasing down ledes, they fed into the masturbatory race to be the first on the scene, the first chasing the ambulance and the first with a shot of the takedown. In the end, none of them got anything. Aside from some spectacular CBS shots of the take-down, most TV crews added very little to the coverage. Live reports from the field were largely a bevy of reporters spread across town, delivering reports that either bordered on speculative or redundant, as the same four clips rolled on-screen. What was being lost in the meantime? Across town, three of the younger Tsarnaev’s roommates were being led out by cops for questioning. While they were later released, without charge or insinuation of guilt, that was a lede that was left to lie fallow as reporters tripped over themselves to scale fences and push against police barriers to get two feet closer to a scene where little was happening in the first place. While newspaper reporters got interviews with classmmates and family, TV networks chose to stay with talking heads and speculate wildly about the things that they were seeing. The need to get that three second clip first pushed them away from getting a good package, an hour from then.

• Conservatism can be just as bad as speculation. As Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hid out in a boat, firing shots at police, CNN carried that the younger suspect was “in a structure.” They kept that line — despite knowing it was a boat — for a solid hour, even as other networks ran, correctly, with “boat.” That confusion led to imprecise reporting and vague hits from their infuriating reporters — they continue to make mention of a gas tank nearby the suspect that complicated police actions. Assuming most viewers think like I do, I wondered of the possibility of an external gas tank for the house, or if the suspect had a gas tank with him to inflict damage. In actuality, they were referring to the gas tank on the boat, which is an entirely different scenario. That conservatism — no doubt born out of embarrassment from getting it so painfully wrong — led them to hold off for a half hour on reporting the identity of the suspect, long after the other networks had confirmed it.

• Report what you know, not what you think. Virtually every outlet got one critical piece of information painfully wrong — there was only ever two bombs at the marathon. As police grabbed unattended bags and objects that they feared could be housing explosives, the media went wild, at times reporting that there was four or five more bombs on-site. Rather than reporting what they knew — that police were running controlled demolitions of several packages — they jumped, perhaps on an inclination from an officer or spokesperson they spoke to. It’s a repeat of the Newtown, where networks reported that more than one shooter was present, and escaped behind the school. These sort of imprecisions feed the conspiracy mill and fundamentally alter the coverage. Those sort of mistakes, less maligned because they are so endemic, are perhaps more dangerous that the big ones that everyone pulls apart near-instantly.

• Covering one thing is toxic. For all of the TV networks, there was a terrible Catch-22. News would happen in such bursts that not covering the story as things break would be ratings suicide. Yet for each two-hour burst of action, there would be twelve hours of radio silence. But public speculation was so intense that turning to another story — the earthquake in China, say — would have had viewers dropping like flies. A quandary. If the networks had acted as a consortium and decided to break to other news during reprieves in the action, it may have solved this problem, but they didn’t. Talking heads wondered where the duo’s financing came from. They meditated on Islam. They wondered where Chechnya was. It was drivel at best, dangerous bullshit at worst.

What’s the solution? Who knows. Everyone just needs to do better. Much better.