On the warm, clear morning of 9/11, with the towers still ablaze, a workmate and I set out on foot from our office in midtown Manhattan toward what later became known as Ground Zero. This was years before smart phones. With electricity out in much of the downtown, people we passed had turned to a decades-old news source: They huddled around the open doors of parked cars and listened to the radios.

It was a different era, a full generation before the ferocious media firestorm ignited by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings was even thinkable.

With this terrorism incident, whole new constellations of digital-age channels were commandeered by thousands of independent originators of comment, speculation, factual reports, pictures, and sounds.

Their cascades of reporting reached audiences directly and engulfed even the most powerful news media in a tidal flood of urgent raw news that gatekeepers had no choice but to sift, reject, ignore, pursue or publish.

The result, judged by customary standards of care and veracity, was a mess. Legacy media, desperate to keep current with trending online reports, got the number of Boston victims wrong, fingered innocent people as suspects (including a missing college student who, it turned out, had been dead for weeks), relayed falsehoods, reported arrests when there hadn’t been any and a third bombing that never happened, and, for a time, stoked a rancid climate of fear and foreboding well beyond what a measured appraisal of the facts would warrant.

Not good.

So what lessons might we draw? Here are a few.

•  Covering breaking news is one thing; reporting in real time is something else entirely. Handling a breaking story is what journalists do. It means bird-dogging the story as it unfolds and publishing accounts as noteworthy facts surface, are verified and contextualized and can be rendered coherently.

What we saw in the marathon aftermath was a breathless determination by news media to scrape and tell — relaying fragments that were half-understood, unconfirmed, sometimes inaccurate, potentially harmful. It was a fundamental corruption of the purpose of journalism: No longer to inform people carefully and accurately, but to foster a simultaneous experience of collective tragedy, even if that awareness comprised fear, panic and half-truths.

That’s not the news media’s job. Creating simultaneity of experience may or may not be a good thing, but it’s not what journalism is for.

• The more air time, the more junk. Once leading news outlets cleared their plates to report live from Boston, they became ravenous for content. Starving eaters aren’t picky eaters. The result was repetition, excessive weight attached to unimportant or unconfirmed gleanings and a diversion of staff resources from reporting onto presentation.

The newsworthiness of an event isn’t the only consideration in deciding whether to clear the decks of all other programming. There needs to be a reliable flow of honest news. If not, scramble your reporters, let them do their jobs and wait until they have something to report before you put them on camera.

Their job isn’t to fill the air, it’s to get the news.

Then, when they do, that’s what bulletins and updates are for.

•  Watch for errors and fix them. Broadcast media seem to have decided that errors need only be corrected, not labeled as wrong, and that falsities vanish when they’re succeeded by truthful reports.