Wired on Friday: A pioneering example of citizen journalism, the notion that ordinary people can take part in the news-gathering process, was launched last week. Gawker, the New York gossip blog, put its Gawker Stalker feature into map form.
Gawker Stalker is a collection of sightings of celebrities around Manhattan that are reported via e-mail and instant messages by its zealous readers. Although readers no doubt had their minds on higher, or at least more serious, things last week, they could thus have found out where Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves were.
All well and good, but Gawker caused offence by marking its sightings on an interactive map. Cue outrage on cable television news, with stars' publicists complaining about their clients and their clients' children being in danger; a disclosure: Nick Denton, Gawker's publisher, once worked at the Financial Times and we wrote a book together.
Whatever the merits of Gawker Stalker, it is at least a genuine piece of citizen journalism, a genre that is thin on the ground. The internet has set off an explosion of opinion-writing, diary-keeping, photograph-storing and news aggregation. But it has not, so far, produced a lot of first-hand reporting by non-professionals.
Even Rupert Murdoch, who is no spring chicken and so might have been counted upon to be sceptical, is a convert. "Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let's face it, the proprietors," News Corporation's chairman said last week.
An extravagant version of this argument was made by Arianna Huffington, the socialite, intellectual and now blogger, whose Huffington Post is an online collection of blogs by celebrities (including one that she cobbled together on behalf of George Clooney and later had to retract). She wrote in the Guardian that "the blogosphere is now the most vital news source in America".
Hold it right there! News source? Even Huffington's examples do not provide much evidence of that. She cited the London bombings last July, which was a case of ordinary people being closer to a news event than most journalists, and producing a lot of primary material - from eyewitness reports to photographs taken on mobile phones. But, beyond this, the examples are less clear-cut.
The internet has a revolutionary impact on some areas of journalism, most obviously comment and analysis. Anyone can be a columnist now: there is no need to force your way past the old media gatekeepers. That makes for variable quality but it enables many people with genuine expertise to debate things with others.
The internet also allows news to be aggregated and reformatted fluidly. Not only can Yahoo News and Google News assemble their lists of stories but bloggers can link to, and argue about, the ones they believe are the most important.
Websites such as Digg.com allow people to vote on stories, which move up and down a news list. As Murdoch observed, that reduces some of the traditional power of editors. One of the things that editors and reporters are trained to do is pick out the most interesting angle - the "story" - from a mass of material.
The judgments made by professionals can now be challenged by everyone else. Blogs have picked up and publicised stories that were downplayed by news outlets.
But selection is not the whole of news-gathering: you need material from which to select. And most of the news headlines that appear on the Huffington Post - in common with other current affairs blogs - come from mainstream outfits such as the Associated Press. This is fine, but it is an intellectual confidence trick to cite such ventures as evidence that blogs have become news sources.
Where, beyond Gawker Stalker, is truly democratic news-gathering to be found? Attempts to replicate reporting of national and international news with citizen journalism in the US and Europe, such as Wikinews, have not fared particularly well.
Logic suggests that the comparative advantage of citizen journalism is at the local level, where people witness things that are not covered by professional reporters. Local papers have always been full of such news. In my first job in journalism, I edited the sports page of a local newspaper in Devon by assembling reports that had been typed up and submitted by the managers of local teams.
Local news need not be defined simply by geography. Clusters of people with common interests, or those who work in the same company or industry, can earn more by sharing information than by reading a magazine or newspaper. In Silicon Valley, specialist blogs have broken news about, for example, new Apple products by tapping their network of well-informed insiders.
That makes people better informed but it does not please everyone. One person's brave new world of citizen journalism is another's dystopia in which every passer-by and employee is a potential snitch.
When all gatherers of news were professionals, it was at least easier to hide.
