for some on Stanford University’s public relations portal, a staff member told Ars Technica.

User-generated content on news websites is nothing new, though. It started as a way to obtain event photos and brief user comments to drive traffic to news sites, which still continues today (more on that in a future post). But it has now evolved into something much more powerful, as users have not just been included in the newsgathering process, but the reporting process as well.

New York University adjunct professor Clay Shirky explained this notion of increased collaborative capacity made possible by the Internet during a TED talk in 2005. Previously, he says, an institution had to be created to collaborate. That institution would coordinate the activities of the group. Shirky argues that is no longer necessary in all cases because technology has significantly decreased the cost of collaboration among people.

“Because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor – and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination – there has been a second answer, which has been to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system without regard to institutional models.”

Take the “friending” features on a social network. Many social networks allow you to designate your own social network where your information is visible by marking your “friends” on the network. In doing so, the network is automatically redefined for each person to create a more valuable network for each individual. If Facebook were to attempt to determine who each user’s friends independently, it would take years. However, by opening that process up to users, Facebook has distributed that cost over the entire network and harnessed users’ efforts to create a more valuable network for all users and a more meaningful data structure.

For an example in journalism, check out Help Me Investigate, a site that connects users and allows them to collaborate on an investigative reporting project. Anyone can “launch an investigation”, then invite others to help them and eventually publish a report on their findings. Citizens collaborate and file open records requests and do much of the same work that professional reporters once did by breaking investigations up into many small tasks that users can accomplish at their own pace.

A site such as Help Me Investigate is a rare breed in journalism, though, because the site facilitates journalism that is curated by the site’s users. Much more common is a news organization harnessing user power, then employing the organization’s resources to weave the user efforts into a professionally-produced package. Those organizations often also perform a gatekeeping function. In other instances, though, that role is also turned over to users who vote, rank or comment to steer coverage.

For example, when the Dallas Morning News was hit with more than 1,000 pages of documents about the JFK assassination, they posted them online and asked users to weigh in with what they found. The Guardian of London wrote a computer program to handle a similar situation with a giant set of public documents this summer.

Other sites ask users to invest money rather than time. Spot.Us, a California site, funds reporting by soliciting small donations from users – normally about $20 each. Some of the site’s users say the reporting funded by the site fills gaps lacking in coverage by major news outlets. Take as an example this ($5,000) ongoing examination of the San Fransisco city budget.

The Washington Post is currently experimenting with a moderated Wikipedia-like microsite that allows the site’s users to help write profiles of D.C.’s “power players.” Other organizations are simply turning to social media or the comment features on their websites to draw information from users. And it’s quite common among small community newspapers to include citizen columnists and run photos sent in by readers alongside staff-produced content.

Afterthoughts: Chip Stewart points to an experiment from August involving the Washington Post and the New York Times. Both asked readers for help going through a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that had information about what went on in “secret prisons”. In the case of the Times, the documents were posted online and readers posted comments on the Times blog. NPR has a story on the project’s initial results.

Posting documents like the Times and Post did in this case is becoming a more common practice among news organizations, so much so that the Knight Foundation is providing funding to the Times and nonprofit investigative site ProPublica to develop a system, called DocumentCloud, to post documents easier, index them more effectively and allow them to be shared among news organizations. Coverage of DocumentCloud here.

Many of these startups are popping up to fill what they see as gaps in coverage by established news organizations. If professional news organizations can’t fund this coverage, then are there really any other options besides citizen journalism? The New York Times has tried training citizen journalists to produce content for its citizen-run sites. But, is providing training a possible new revenue stream for news organizations? One Texas news organization thinks so. Will these citizen-driven sites ever be appealing to advertisers? And does that even matter if they continue to self-fund?

U.S. Internet users in the year 2013, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer.

Google Moderator lets your users suggest ideas or questions then vote among them

Google Moderator lets you create polls where users can decide between competing questions, suggestions or ideas.

Except it’s different than a traditional poll in that you, the creator, don’t have to provide the ideas for users to choose among. Instead, the tool harnesses the power of the crowd to create the ideas and to moderate the forum and reach a consensus. The White House used the tool in March to solicit questions for the president to answer during a Town Hall meeting.

There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn’t matter, because that’s not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class.

— Clay Shirky speaking at a TED Talks event on the net’s collaborative culture

The popular claim that ‘we are all journalists now’ must be refuted; perhaps we are all producers of online content, but the great values associated with journalism must be nurtured to ensure the high quality reporting that a thriving democracy has the right to expect.

— Ernest Wilson, Dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication in a piece for Poynter, “Where are J-Schools in Great Debate over Journalism’s Future?”