I can show you several examples of where what you’re suggesting works — to a point. What breaks it is the ole Too Many Chiefs Syndrome.

One good example is the Brockton Enterprise in Massachusetts, which has for years employed townspeople to report their own news. The news was always timely, relevant and right to the point. They’ve worked this formula to good successful for years before the proliferation of The Internet.

Why? Because the same people who would be dropping dimes for the newsroom would just as soon write up a quick column to achieve the same purpose. The reporting was usually restricted to meetings and other zoning and school board votes. Issues of balance, fairness and equal space seldom became an issue. Lots of people can write. You’ve got retired teachers out there, professionals with undergrad English degrees. You’d be surprised.

The problem with that system is that inevitably someone inhouse gets the idea that “there’s more to the story.” At that point the story is taken away from the person who originally generated it, its given to a staffer and then is magically transformed into an in-house political football, i.e., You’re Right Back To Where You’ve Started — too few resources devoted to too little copy with too little time to work in. But such is life.

You need staff to do things, whether they’re inhouse or out in the streets. In order to make it work you’d first have to develop a deep pool of dependable stringers before you could develop a workable outsourcing protocol, but all you’re really doing there is replacing the people you laid off or fired with people to whom you don’t have to pay a salary.

And then there’s no guarantee they’ll stay. But, as Carole King once sang, does anybody really stay anywhere anymore?

From where I sit, the issue will be if PN’s culture can change.

Hey, @Pat. Am I right when I say that if a gourmet restaurant changes its wait staff, the experience has a new face but it probably still tastes the same. If the same restaurant changes a chef, it becomes a new restaurant.

Reporters with decades of experience are not wait staff, but for this example, the analogy applies.

PN has changed who serves the soup, instead of who creates the menu.

Perhaps some kind of value-ranking by readers would help bubble the good stuff to the top. But judging by the people who are attracted to weigh on at local news sites, there will be a far more people posting to further their partisan agendas (pro-growth or anti, say, or pro or anti the current city government) than interested in helping keep their fellow citizens informed.

I think you and I agree, it’s filtering all the crap that’s tough. If you need more “skilled reporter[s] to sift through what’s valuable,” though, again, how much money have you saved?

It used to be that virtually none of that filtering was necessary — back when all the feedback readers could offer were letters to the editor, published at the editor’s discretion.

I’m not saying those were halcyon days. But seeing what you get when you offer a clean feedback loop to readers makes me appreciate an editor’s talents all the more. And I think there’s a real price we pay as communities if we allow a small minority of people to change the character of our local media — read the PA Weekly’s reader forum and you’d think that the town was populated entirely by cranky, contrarian, mostly right wing complainers. But they’re just the ones most motivated to have their say, while the rest of the community is keeping their heads-down earning a living.

Local media needs to be careful not to cede their character too much — otherwise they’ll simply be visited less and less.

On the obits — maybe. But our weekly lets people write their own long-form obits already, only it charges families for them. Publish only those and cut the fact-checked, staff-edited ones and you’ve made a saving but lost a source of revenue, too.

@Simon — I’m not necessarily a proponent of turning the keys over to the “citizen journalists,” just of giving them a seat on the bus. Even the blowhards and egotists and axe-grinders have valuable information to share…it just takes a skilled reporter to sift through what’s valuable and what can be discarded.

But that’s assuming we’re talking about political stories. For now, there’s no reason that army can’t be deployed in more benign areas like traffic and gas prices. Instead of writing Man on the Street or Black Friday stories, we can allow readers to send their own anecdotes in.

There’s a wide variety of ways our readers can be used, some more controversial than others. We might as well start with the easy ones.

Sure, better sourcing is great, but I think the real dilemma comes in the precise way you turn your sources into stories.

Like Pat suggested in the comment above, it’s really all about your editorial practices.

A lot of talk about the ‘citizen-journalists’ of the future essentially turns readers into writers and writers into editors.

Fine, but the danger is that the people most willing to help you do this are going to be your community’s worst blowhards, egoists, conspiracy theorists and axe-grinders (to quote a blog entry I just wrote on this very question: http://simonfirth.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/the-anderson-valley-advertiser-and-the-future-of-journalism). And what they choose to share often just isn’t worth anyone else’s time reading.

That’s been the case in our neck of the woods, where the Palo Alto Weekly’s been having a hell of a time trying to keep its user-generated Town Square Forum something other than a sand-box for crazies.

Hiring unpaid writers to do your work means keeping a much closer editorial eye on what they’re sending you — at least if you want your output to stay at the same quality level. In some cases you might win out, but I’m guessing that too often either you’ll be left with a degraded product or a shift in expenses, rather than any real savings.