“During the drama of the Boston manhunt and car chase, it never occurred to me to turn on the TV. The screen I needed was on my iPhone, where I followed the tweets of newspaper reporters running through the streets of Boston and Cambridge residents listening to gunfire in real-time. The Internet is messy, pointillist, noisy, often wrong. But if you had a visceral need for instantaneity, TV couldn’t compete.

“Reporters doing TV news in real-time are an oxymoron: You can’t gather news and present it at the same time. Part of newsgathering is the gathering part.

“People on Twitter were crowing about how superior Twitter is to old media. What they meant was, ‘See, we’re faster than TV.’ And I’m there. But I’m also still an old-media guy, because the information that matters sometimes comes the next day or the next month, when there is time to digest and interpret. The best reporting in Boston last week was not in cyberspace. It was in the two great daily newspapers that were on the scene, The Boston Globe and The Times.

“The battle lines are being drawn between the crowds and the experts. The crowds are fast and can be smart, but sometimes they’re horribly wrong, like the Internet vigilantes on Reddit who thought they could do better than the F.B.I. in looking at photographs and exposing the guilty. But crowd-sourcing was also part of the newsgathering. In a very real way, we had eyes and ears everywhere.”

I asked him about the episode on Tuesday, when Syrian hackers took over The Associated Press’s Twitter account and falsely reported that there had been two explosions at the White House and that the president was injured — a hoax that sent the Dow into a tailspin for three minutes and wiped out $136 billion from the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

“There’s no perfect trust in cyberspace,” Jim said. “There are not only millions of voices, but millions of masks. You don’t know who’s who. There was a real Twitter account for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but, instantly, there was a fake Twitter account for him, too.

“We have all these new channels and tools to understand the world as it happens, but there’s no reliable algorithm for sorting through the morass. It used to be to read the morning paper on the way to work and read the evening paper on the way home. Now we have to invent a new personal methodology every day. And if we’re waiting for things to settle down and become simple, that’s never going to happen.”

And then poor Jim, as confused as the rest of us, stared into space.