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22-hour voyage from Surabaya to Lombok aboard the KRI Makassar naval warship marked the commemoration of this year'€™s National Press Day, as if to reflect the rough seas Indonesian journalists must now navigate if they are to stay relevant amid the information technology revolution.

Across the world, including in Indonesia, the phenomenon of '€œcitizen journalism'€ is thriving as circulation of newspapers dwindles, news portals struggle to survive and TV stations rely on entertainment programs rather than news reports to lure advertising.

With social media hosting millions of messages every second, who of the 100,000 to 150,000 registered journalists in the country can claim to perform the noble duty of a messenger? Everybody now has the capacity to report, in the form of text, pictures or video, about everything under the sun, with information broadcast long before the '€œreal'€ journalists show up.

The breaking news of terrorist attacks near the landmark Sarinah department store in Central Jakarta last month reached the public through social media well before the carnival of news portals and live TV reports arrived. As a medium of information transmission, social media was also the initial witness to a politician'€™s revelation he had been appointed to an important job with the National Intelligence Agency (BIN), which of course turned the new appointee into a laughing stock.

Social media and hundreds of millions of citizen journalists present a clear danger to the mainstream media and its professional journalists, not only in terms of the speed and quantity of information they offer but also, sooner or later, the quality. Who would deny the validity, and to some extent insight, of postings in free media like The Huffington Post?

So what room is left for professional journalists if the public can update and access everything that interests it through social media immediately and for free?

Members of Indonesian journalist associations now gathering in Lombok, an island neighboring Bali, may share the opinion of Indonesian Journalists Association (PWI) chairman Margiono, who lauded the 2016 National Press Day as '€œthe greatest commemoration in history'€. Indeed, with the variety of related activities, including the unprecedented '€œvoyage of journalists'€, and the attendance of President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo and his ministers, the celebration will be billed as the most lavish ever.

But such grandiosity does not mean anything if the public, the audience, no longer considers the Indonesian press relevant. The nightmare of irrelevance can only be kept at bay if journalists continue to enhance their skills while strictly upholding their values, in particular press freedom as a prerequisite for a working democracy.

For journalists, freedom should entail the responsibility to provide people with verified information and to find out not only the facts, but also the truth about, and behind, the facts. Journalists will remain relevant only if the knowledge they transmit is based on a sincere desire to change the world for the better.

A long and stormy voyage indeed.