I’ve seen a fair number of these citizen-journalist efforts, and none of them have been impressive. It’s not that journalists have special skills–if you can operate a telephone and an automobile, and write at a high-school level, you, too, can be a journalist. Maybe it’s that journalists don’t have special skills, as Dave Barry wrote: “I don’t know how to do anything useful, so I’m a columnist.” But journalists can make a reasonable living at what they do without having to do anything really difficult, like getting into a good law school or selling real estate. Incentives! Citizen-journalists don’t have much incentive for reporting the news.