If you fancy being a journalist, there has never been a better time - provided you don't mind giving your services for free.
Dozens of websites now want you to report for them, especially if you have been involved in an earthquake or flood, or been on site during a campus massacre. Train and helicopter crashes, forest fires, robberies and countless other events can at least make local news.
Among these websites is CNN's iReport. All you have to do is upload your story, photo or video. Last month, CNN featured 915 user reports drawn from more than 10,000 submissions. Both numbers are expected to grow.
What's often called "user-generated news" is mainly the result of the mobile phone revolution. People have always been around newsworthy events, but only now do they have the means to report them to hand - literally.
With a mobile, you can take a photo, write a caption or story, and send it to a news source in minutes. You can certainly do it faster than CNN can get a reporter to the spot.
And you don't have to be brilliant. Shaky footage of a plane crash is better than no footage, and perhaps even makes it look more authentic.
Citizen journalism
One of the pioneers of "citizen journalism" was South Korea's OhMyNews, launched in February 2000. It's a professional-looking alternative to paid-for newspapers. A similar but more global example is Topix, which provides news from almost everywhere.
iReport is much more like YouTube. It's not just CNN's way of sucking in user-generated content, but a community site where people upload, rate and comment on whatever takes their fancy.
What visitors get is "Unedited. Unfiltered. News". That means nobody is vetting or censoring stuff before it goes online, though "inappropriate content" is removed as soon as possible.
However, iReport does let you click for Fresh iReports (uploaded minutes earlier) or Highest Rated, Most Viewed, Most Commented, Most Shared, On CNN (the stories that were picked up and broadcast), or the Newsiest stories. The new home page, introduced last Thursday, always shows the 12 newsiest iReports.
Of course, not everyone can be at a newsworthy scene, but anyone can tackle a topic from iReport's Assignment Desk. These include: Show us your commute, Polaroid memories, and Father's Day hits and misses.
Superstar iReporters
People who get into the top 20% for their activities, comments and ratings are labelled Superstar iReporters.
CNN says: "We know that even here, at CNN, we can't be everywhere, all the time following all the stories you care about. So, we give you iReport.com. You will program it, you will police it; you will decide what's important, what's interesting, what's news."
By developing iReport as a separate platform with its own branding, CNN is making sure readers do not confuse its professional news service with an unfiltered platform run by users.
I think that's right. Every news organisation should value its integrity higher than it values the web hits from user-generated content.
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