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Howard Owens points to a Media Life story quoting UNC J-prof Frank Fee, raising questions about "citizen journalism:"

“It goes back to the days of country correspondents or stringers. They are limited in what they can do, and newspapers have never been very good about training those people. ... I have seen some horrendous mistakes made by people who don’t know what they are doing."

I think the real problem is that journalists (and journalism professors) keep pounding a square peg into a round hole and then complaining about the fit.

People in general are not clamoring to become amateur journalists. Publishers: Chill out. This is not a way for you to get free labor, cut the newsroom staff, and preserve your margins.

That's not the point.

People want to participate in a community conversation. We can build a separate and new business model around facilitation of that online conversation.

That conversation is good for traditional journalism because it builds social capital -- connections, roots -- and interest in local civic life.

And by becoming participative listeners in those online conversations, our professional reporters can get a deeper insight into the community, a better read on what people think is important. They can collect leads, practical tips on stories that need to be pursued. They can do a better job.

And they can put a more human face on the journalism process, helping repair the newspaper brand.

We need to stop confusing ourselves about participative media. Yes, there is significant overlap between the social functions of traditional journalism and the social functions of partitipative media and community conversation. But they are not the same thing, they are not replacements for one another, and we should all stop the sniping from the respective camps.

In a recent report on Web 2.0, the Pew Internet & American Life project documents the performance of three participatory websites against their more conventional counterparts: Photobucket vs. Kodakgallery, Wikipedia vs. Encarta, Myspace vs. Geocities. The comparisons are compelling. I'll skip the thousand words and just pass along the pictures:

Last year Tom Grubisch examined a number of local "citizen journalism" projects and declared that what he found, "apart from a couple of honorable exceptions, is the Internet equivalent of Potemkin villages -- an elaborate façade with little substance behind it."

A year later he reexamines these projects for OJR.org. He finds some signs of progress, but also has some harsh criticisms.

Meanwhile, writing for NAA's Presstime monthly magazine Michael Snyder takes a look at several newspaper-related projects. (I am quoted in both pieces.)

Update:Also note the Kelsey Group has an interview with Backfence CEO Susan DeFife.

Some of the coverage of Friday's announcement from Gannett that things will be different misses the most important points. This is not about putting breaking news online all day long, which -- as I observed the other day -- is hardly a new idea. Nor is it about equipping reporters with video cameras.

Wired's Jeff Howe nails it on his blog item, which focuses on "7 primary job areas" that are fairly buried in the Dubow memo.

It's role shift time. This is about engagement, convening community, utility, and thinking big about small. The "what" and not just the "when" and "how."

Om Malik profiles a company he calls "the American Idol of digital photography." The idea: Get photographers to compete online to get their work printed in a magazine. The site: JPG magazine.

It's human nature to compete for scarce resources. Online space isn't scarce, but print always is scarce. I wonder what use newspapers could make of this principle. Hmm.

The article also has some hints about how JPG's website was built, taking advantage of new Web services such as Amazon.com's S3.

We think of Amazon.com as a retailer, but it's unveiled some powerful new web services that can make it possible for disruptive new Web 2.0 sites to be developed:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables massive online data storage and simple HTTP delivery in a "cloud," in which you pay only for the storage and bandwidth you use. This makes it possible for a video site, for example, to grow rapidly without having to manage the planning, investment and project management processes associated with adding storage arrays.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) extends this principle to computing processes. You can configure a virtual server image -- starting with a Fedora Linux base -- that includes all your applications and configuration. To add a server, you simply place an electronic order through a web services API. Absolutely all of the server setup processes from then on are automated. Your servers are up and running within minutes.

Pricing on both is cheap and tied directly to what you use. Need more servers? Start them up. Need fewer? Release the resources to the grid.

The disruption will kick in as entrepreneurs imagine new ways to use this power.

It's not just about running webservers. Think video transcoding. CGI rendering. Engineering computations. A university could configure an on-demand scalable parallel computing farm for scientific modeling. Since it's all done on a machine-hour basis, 100 machines could work for one hour instead of 1 machine for 100 hours. This doesn't apply to all classes of problems, but many new doors are opened.

Scott Karp asks: Has the Myspace downturn begun? He has charts and graphs, too.

Many of us believe brands are much more volatile today than a generation ago. Great brands are still hard (and expensive) to build, but the amplified word of mouth that's made possible by the Internet allows the almost-overnight creation of Myspace as a $580 million brand. What happens next? Is it a lasting brand? Don't forget that "easy come" is often followed by "easy go."

For those of us who care about local newspapers, there's another question: Can we play in the same space as Myspace? Is there room for us to facilitate local interactive communities?

I think we can, and that's part of the reasoning behind the next-generation website concept that Morris is piloting in Savannah, Ga.

Newspapers need to learn how to play a value-add role in local online community, and that includes people under retirement age (the people known as "our loyal readers").

Myspace is hot right now. But not as hot as you might think -- my inhouse focus group (i.e., teenage daughter) has shifted to Xanga. Kids change allegiances almost as fast as they change clothes. I'm not intimidated by Myspace in 2006 any more than I was by Prodigy in 1996.