Readers are relying on Facebook, blogs and Twitter for instant but unverified news.

History, it is said, is written by the winners.

But what happens when the losers have their own publishing system as well? Speaking truth to power has never been easier through the use of new media, rendering the foundations of traditional media shakier than ever.

After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed protesters of the election results in Iran as disgruntled soccer fans and as “dust,” one demonstrator responded with this Twitter message: “Ahmadinejad called us Dust, we showed him a sandstorm.”

As the week wore on and reporters from organizations like The New York Times, the BBC and CNN were being forced to leave the country as their visas expired, the story was being left in the hands of Iranians brave enough to take cellphone pictures and videos, post updates on Twitter and blog about the protest movement. With the state in control of television and newspapers, Iranians turned to Facebook and text messaging to learn about the protests. When those outlets were shut down as well, Twitter was all they had left.

But there is a downside to these nontraditional media, including the difficulty of verifying sources and the threat to personal safety. The risks - taken by independent journalists and citizens who do not have the support of a large organization that can wield influence in critical situations - are substantial, Brian Stelter wrote in The Times. Two Americans from the startup news channel Current TV learned that lesson the hard way when they were detained by North Korean border guards in March and sentenced in early June to 12 years of hard labor.

“There’s an impetus with any upstart news organization that you have to be bolder and you have to be more aggressive than other news organizations to get attention for your stories,” Kevin Sites, a freelance journalist who covered conflicts for Yahoo, told Mr. Stelter. “That also has a real inherent risk in it.”

Big news outlets “have resources that they can call upon to come to the aid” of journalists, Robert Mahoney, the deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists told Mr. Stelter. “They have access to the airwaves that cannot be underestimated.”

When Alan Johnston, a reporter for the BBC, was kidnapped in Gaza in 2007, the network held rallies, organized petitions and arranged for coverage on other networks to press for his release. He was let go after four months in custody.

Nontraditional media outlets take risks in other ways to attract attention. As Damon Darlin wrote in The Times, when two blogs, TechCrunch and Gawker, posted rumors that Apple was interested in buying Twitter, they lured many readers and got hundreds of comments. The rumor was soon exposed as false.

“I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the writer of the Twitter post, told Mr. Darlin.

Blogs cannot compete with the resources of news organizations, so the temptation to take chances with potentially newsworthy information, despite doubts about its validity, is strong.

“Getting it right is expensive,” Mr. Arrington said. “Getting it first is cheap.”