If it bleeds, it leads – that most reliable axiom of journalism – may be nowhere as true as on Twitter. War, natural disasters, sudden violence, and their confusion, certainly get an immediate, spontaneous, and vivid expression in a tweet roll.

Andy Carvin, a social media promoter, gained lots of attention for himself, and for Twitter's usefulness in fraught circumstances, during the successive convulsions of the Arab spring. It was largely his focus on personal stories, on individual pain and terror, that made his obsessive tweeting compelling, and that form the basis of his just-published book, Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution. "Unflinching, real-time depiction of conflict" is Carvin's metier, according to the book's press notes.

[Carvin] is reinventing how people experience the news. No longer merely consuming it, they participate in it, interacting with the very people on the ground engaged in the uprisings.

Late last week, Carvin applied his you-are-there, or I-am-there-in-spirit, tweeting approach to the school shooting in Connecticut, not just noting each raw increment of the unfolding story, but adjudicating on, and frequently scolding, the rest of the media's confused accounts. From a remote control booth, Carvin uses Twitter as a field walkie-talkie calling out to others, and then centralizing their reports. In theory, he's harnessing the eyes and ears of people actually on the ground, in sight of the carnage, and, as it were, disintermediating the outside cameras and hacks yet to arrived – or who might not ever arrive (aka parachuting reporters).

This is "crowdsourcing", that new notion of information collection and retrieval that has become a cliche even before its actual process has been much tested or entirely defined. Carvin is certainly a bona fide practitioner of a new form of journalism, inventing a role for himself that seems as native as the network anchorman became to television in the 1960s. (Carvin even has his own signature signoff before he stops tweeting for the night: "Stay safe, everyone.")

This successfully assumed identity seems to have compelled his employer, NPR, quite a traditional news organization, to have acknowledged his special standing with the awkward title, "senior product manager for online communities". As it happens, and perhaps the awkwardness of his title reflects NPR's discomfort here, Carvin himself has no journalism or reporting experience. He was a not-for-profit administrator involved with digital issues, primarily how to expand public computing resources to those without, when he started to focus on computing's role in mass events – a good way to promote the importance of computers for all.

Carvin's interest has never been reporting, per se, or storytelling, or even, in the manner of the untrained war reporter, experiencing the reality for himself. Rather, his vocation, along with promoting social media itself, has been that new information role called "curation" – another cliche even before being adequately defined – which has somehow become an uber form of editing.

Carvin's elevation to sacred cow and groundbreaking auteur in the new news media has strongly benefited from the digital establishment's instant and militant defense of its own, and the old media establishment's ambivalence about itself. Indeed, Carvin has what seems like a personal publicist in the technology writer, Matthew Ingram, who often tweets and writes about Carvin's significance, going so far as to say he ought to win a Pulitzer prize for tweeting. Likewise, Carvin has become a constant and scornful disciplinarian of the news media that does win Pulitzer prizes – and, more often than not, is praised, courted, and quoted by that media.

When the details of the shooting first started to emerge last Friday morning, Carvin quickly moved to insert himself as the grandmaster tweeter, consolidating, parsing, weighing the other tweets in his wide purview. His talent is not just speed but centrality: he assumes a striking intimacy with the event at hand.

He quickly became bathed in Newtown's drama, proudly explaining during Friday's marathon tweeting session that CNN had called to try to get him on the air, thinking he was at the scene rather than in Washington, DC. (He noted, from his 300-mile distance from the event: "Just called home. Never been so relieved to hear my son's voice in the background.")

He also became, on Friday morning, a fevered spreader of misinformation.

While claiming not to retweet most of what he finds, because of its questionable provenance, he nevertheless tweeted a rather broad range of bollocks. There was news of a mysterious purple van that does not seem actually have existed. Then there was, suddenly, a second shooter theory that got Carvin's attention. And the gunman's brother found dead. And two bodies at the mother's house. And he piled on to the fake letter moment – retweeting reports about a letter supposedly written by a child from inside the school.

While the guise is to retweet in order to verify, the effect is to propagate.

Carvin's defender, Ingram, had to rush into the fray with a blog saying that this is how news works: misinformation emerges. But fortunately, there are people like Carvin, practicing social media, to sort it out.

Part of the background noise to Carvin's incessant tweeting is Carvin defending his "method", and complaining about being the wounded party: "Looks like another occasion for MSM to blame social for spreading rumors when many of the rumors spread to social *from* MSM."

It is this self-righteousness, and claim of moral stature, that, more than the technology, may give him his leeway and license – and voice. By virtue of his immersion in social media, he identifies with suffering more than people who see the world through traditional media. Through social media, he shares the pain.

He's the empathy king. He feels everything ("First thing I did at restaurant tonight: identify exits, hiding places, and objects that could be used to fight back"), and it is unbearable ("I just wonder how many others are having weird flashbacks that combine Arab Spring violence with yesterday's shooting," he says a day after the mayhem).

And he doesn't go away, he keeps tweeting and keeps feeling ("unflinching", according to his publicist), vastly more than the heartless cynics and professional snobs of nonsocial and nonparticipatory media ("Putting away phone. Gonna go sit in my kids' rooms for a while – just to reflect on today. You should do the same with yours. Stay safe.")

The new journalism, it turns out, is every bit as self-dramatizing as the old.

• Andy Carvin has responded below, with an edited version of his long-form reply to Michael Wolff's article