Where do journalists/reporters who get paid to do reporting for corporate paymasters, but also participate in Citzen Journalism because of the gaping abyss left by mainstream media work, actually fit in?

The pleasure and frustration is that, in conjunction/and with the assistance of fellow CJ’s, we’ve essentially broken more stories despite giving the “one phone call is research to me” twits in the newsroom a chance to use materials collected.

4 days later the msm weasels report on it like it’s their gospel and one sits there steaming as you hear yr own copy being read.

It’s a curious thing.

It’s also at the point where I’ll take something I put more work into to such places as TheUptake or DigitalJournal and not even waste my time with the so-called ‘real media’, excepting alt weeklies or network afilliate radio.

As i like to say, most msm is where “press releases go to become news and news goes to die”

And to be clear, I love the work you guys are doing at the UpTake, though, like Chris Anderson wrote, I’d call it “networked journalism” instead. You’re a pro at this .

The UpTake is providing unprecedented video coverage of statewide congressional races in Minnesota, for example – providing perspectives and stories often missing before.

We have had some impact on the national scene though – we had one of the only interviews with the “Obama is in Arab” woman in Lakeville, MN who said she sends out letters telling the “truth” about Obama. Those stories aren’t game changers but they do enrich and deepen the existing MSM, etc. coverage.

And of course, our RNC coverage was one of the few places you could get unfiltered look at what was really happening in the streets of St. Paul.

And I definitely agree with the idea of just calling all of this “networked journalism,” whatever that really means.

But the trend that I’ve been noticing — and that led me to this critique — is that almost ALL of the influentials this time around are much more traditional that I expected they would be. There isn’t a reliance on the network in the way that many of us expected.

That’s where this emailers-as-sources thing gets interesting. Maybe, while we’re theorizing about the importance and usefulness of the network, this old school, two-way form of communication is actually more networked and useful than we thought, and newer, more consciously constructed forms like Off the Bus are proving to be of limited usefulness.

This gets to another point, which is that, after a few years of preaching about the primacy of bottom-up activism, I think we’re seeing the resurgence of Web 1.0-like editorial control over content. That, combined with the grassroots stuff, is what makes things interesting and relevant.

What if we took Jeff Jarvis’ advice and just dropped the distinction between amateur and pro, between citizen and something else, and just started talking about networked journalism?

I wrote about this in some of my recent newsroom research. Instead of asking who is an amateur / pro / cit. j, etc, maybe we should ask:

• What kind of work does this worker journalist do? Does she report? Add context? Give opinion? Reframe the story? Facilitate community conversation?

• Where does he or she publish that work? Online? In print? With a formal media institution, or within a diffuse collection of networked journalists?

• Finally, what is the formal contractual relationship between the worker journalist and their publishing entity? Do they work for free? Engage in piecework? Feelance? Or have they managed to obtain the kind of salaried work that was once more common in the world of journalism?

Citizen journalists, or free labor?

I never saw Josh Marshall as a “citizen journalist.” He was a journalist, who figured out long before others how to crowdsource his reporting.

Others have caught on.

One other point: Citizen journalism is alive and well, but maybe less so in the blogosphere. Citizen journalism has evolved from blogs, out to YouTube, and Twitter, and maybe even wikipedia.