The Local, the series of community blogs for The New York Times, today introduced the Virtual Assignment Desk that encourages citizens to report or ask for reporting to be done on particular events.

The Fort Greene-Clinton Hill blog, for instance, asks for volunteers for a community meeting. It outlines the agenda, makes a few suggestions on what's needed, and provides a deadline. If you volunteer, you first register. If you need more help, the Times seems prepared to train and answer questions on craft.

It's an interesting effort many will watch. It's no small effort, too, to direct the content, so it'll also be interesting to see how easily sustained the project is. Meantime it's bound to add to the depth of local content --- hyperlocal it might even be called --- on what is already a very rich site of material.

Guest contributors Edward Wasserman writes in The Miami Herald about the challenges of financing journalism and the realization that journalism may no longer be the preserve of those paid to do it.

He sees the emergence of the op-ed model, crowdsources, contribution-fed opinionated aggregators. There are several problems to the model, not the least of which is coherence and commitment.

"In the economic crisis that's shaking journalists out of the conventional news business, we may have no choice but to trust to the zeal and generosity of volunteers to keep journalism alive -- and retain some semblance of the scrutiny and accountability that keeps public life honest," he writes.

Columbia Journalism Review features an interesting chronicle from Amanda Michel on the early lessons from OffTheBus, a citizen media site that corralled a great deal of attention in the U.S. election campaign.

Michel makes many significant points about the experience, in particular the growing pains of a start-up and the herding-of-cats feel to the management of some 12,000 contributors.

Some of the bits I divined: Stories, not technology, were most important. The discipline of verification remained a challenge. The need to invent a new form (generative features, it turned out) was required. Bias ensued at times.

It's a very entertaining account and a textbook entry for anyone launching into networked journalism.

Pat Thornton's The Journalism Iconoclast posts too infrequently. When he does, there's more often than not a good kernel in there, as in his latest post on why citizen-driven content can be good for journalism.

Thornton sees no reason why there continues to be a divide between the pros and the non-pros. There is a virtual army available to help bring information and no shortage of platforms to serve it.

His conclusion is attractive: "Professional journalists should concentrate on harnessing that resource instead of fighting it. They’ll bring the what, we’ll bring the why, and journalism will be better than ever before. It’s not us versus them. It’s we."

Harvard professor Persephone Miel has examined the arrival of participatory, citizen-generated media in order to evaluate its contribution to the landscape.

Not surprisingly she finds that on its own it cannot replace so-called legacy media. But she thinks that one day it might be able to.

"Participatory media is great, has lots of potential. But it’s not doing everything we have counted on journalism institutions to do and, left to its own devices, it never will. Those journalism institutions, never perfect, are in serious trouble. Many will save themselves, as businesses, but there is no guarantee they will maintain their commitment to doing the journalism we need. People who for whatever reason (time, money, skills, desire) are not taking charge of creating their own online news diet still deserve to have access to comprehensive credible sources of news."

At first blush, her 168-page report has plenty of talking points. Principally she notes that traditional media are running out of steam and need to think through new models to sustain themselves.

Now here's a good idea. It takes a fair amount of work, consistency and commitment, but it's a smart route to the pro-am hybrid most expect daily journalism to require.
The Oakland Press is launching a "classroom" --- and institute as it calls it --- for citizen journalism. Essentially anyone can come in and get some tutoring from the newsroom on techniques in scheduled sessions.
The aim is to generate understanding that will lead to publication online or in print.

The Guardian writes today of the offer from German's Bild newspaper in conjunction with the Lidl supermarket chain to offer consumers a low-cost (about 70 euros) digital camera and a direct link to its operation to upload photos.
In the old days, of course, newspapers offered cameras to children or selected groups in order to cultivate pictures in a contest. But Bild's approach is to cultivate a community of contributors, and it's an interesting initiative.