Not waiting for the asteroid, a dinosaur evolves;

Linda Parker has a memo for professional journalists: Contrary to the fear rippling through newsrooms, citizens don’t want your job. They don’t want to interview obscure officials to write boring stories about arcane changes in local zoning laws. As online communities editor, Parker should know. A GetPublished! button features prominently on many Enquirer Web pages, and the submissions land in Parker’s queue. They almost never resemble anything commonly considered journalism.
“It used to read, ‘Be a Citizen Journalist,'” Parker says. “And no one ever clicked on it. Then we called it ‘Neighbor to Neighbor,’ and still nothing. For some reason, ‘Get Published’ was the magic phrase.” Parker, a cheerful woman in her mid-fifties, will pore over several dozen submissions from readers today. These will range from a local custom-car builder trumpeting his upcoming appearance on the BET show Spring Bling to an emotional notice about a play being staged to raise funds for a fifth-grader’s bone marrow transplant. Contributors submit to one of 233 neighborhood Web sites, each aimed at a town or community in the Cincinnati area. Parker approves the submission (“I almost never reject one,” she says), scans it for “the F-word,” and posts it to the site. “A few years ago, these would have come across the transom as press releases and been ignored.”
There’s a valuable lesson here — and not just for newspapers. Citizens are desperate to broadcast their message to their communities; they just aren’t going to employ the conventions of journalism to do so. “One of our most popular categories is called First-Person,” Parker says. “People really love to reminisce about the 1937 flood. We got great stories on that.” The reader submissions do more than provide the Enquirer with additional content to sell ads against. “Our 27 suburban papers could never fill their pages without this material.” One of the common criticisms levied against Gannett is that it is crowdsourcing content in order to cut staff, but this charge misses the point. Crowdsourcing enables the publisher to expand: more Web pages, more niche publications, more ads.
While much of the citizen-produced writing is about church picnics and school sports, readers are also contributing to serious journalistic investigations, breathing new life into a genre that is increasingly considered an endangered species at metropolitan newspapers. Last spring, The News-Press, a Gannett paper in Fort Myers, Florida, heard that readers from a new housing development were being charged up to $45,000 to connect to the water and sewer system. Rather than assign a conventional investigative reporter to the story, “we asked our readers to help us find out why the cost was so exorbitant,” says Kate Marymont, News-Press executive editor.
The response overwhelmed the paper, which had to assign additional staff just to deal with the volume of tips, phone calls, and emails. The News-Press posted hundreds of pages of documents to its site, and readers organized their own investigations: Retired engineers analyzed blueprints, accountants examined balance sheets, and an inside whistle-blower leaked evidence of possible bid-rigging. “We had people from all over the world helping us,” Marymont says.

The information firehose illustrated.
If mainstream journalists and their editors would pause to absorb that first sentence quoted, the relationship with news consumers might mature into something useful. Allow the channel of communication to flow both ways, and the quality, accuracy and authoritativeness of journalism can only improve. How do we know? See here.
They may even coax back some former readers.
Contrary to popular media mythology, bloggers don’t want your jobs.
We’d just like you to do yours.

Catch this little gem at CTV;

(h/t reader Rob)
Update – SDA gets results!