NEW YORK: Today's media environment is more competitive and accountable to consumers than ever before, top journalists said Wednesday at the PRWeek NEXT Conference.

Bill Holstein, president of the Overseas Press Club, said “the gatekeeper role has pretty much been shattered" in reference to the role media plays in disseminating information to the public at large.

In response to a question about whether digital newsrooms have adequate fact-checking ability, Todd Wassermann, business and marketing editor at Mashable, added that his site's ...