The future of online journalism will be professionals and readers working together to get the real story

Kurt Greenbaum is Online News Director for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He can be reached at kgreenbaum@post-dispatch.com.

A RECORD NUMBER OF JOURNALISTS showed up for this year's annual Online News Association conference in October. Our interpretation: Newsrooms were more eager than ever to get up to speed on publishing news stories, graphics and video to the Web.

The irony: Fully a third of the sessions at this year's conference were dedicated to just the opposite proposition. Instead of journalists publishing the content, get 'em out of the way.

Make way for the readers.

It's been more than a year since Time magazine named "You" the person of the year, recognizing your passion for online publishing: writing blogs, posting Flickr photos, networking on Facebook, posting YouTube videos and connecting on microblogging sites such as Twitter.

Meanwhile, the newspaper industry is slowly recognizing vast changes in the audience's demands.

Yes, they want breaking news from trusted sources and professional journalists.

But they also want to participate. Some have referred to this trend as "citizen journalism." Blogger Jeff Jarvis has taken credit - and blame - for popularizing the expression on BuzzMachine.com. Director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York, Jarvis now refers to the phenomenon as "networked journalism."

In his first blog item on the subject in 2006, Jarvis says networked journalism "takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story."

He says the "public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. ... After the story is published - online, in print, wherever - the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts and perspective ... not to mention promotion via links."

In my own newsroom we've rejiggered my job description to encourage this involvement. Like many newsrooms, we're walking in this area, not yet running, but we are recognizing that we must make room for reader-generated content and collaboration between newsroom and news consumer. Some examples:

• When Shawn Hornbeck was found in a suburban St. Louis apartment four years after his kidnapping, readers reacted immediately in our Talk of the Day blog with praise, thanksgiving - and questions. Many of those questions helped inform our coverage over the ensuing days and weeks.

• A wicked ice storm in late November 2006 knocked out power to 600,000 in our region. When we invited readers to send photos, they sent hundreds of them - including shots from the popular Lake of the Ozarks resort community. Those pictures tipped us to a story others missed. Our A1 story included a reader's photo.

• As I write this, we're prepping for the shutdown of a major interstate through town. Among our many plans: field updates from a dozen community volunteers. They'll use Twitter.com to post impressions, anecdotes and horror stories from the traffic fallout when Interstate 64 is closed. Those updates will be fed to our Web site at STLtoday.com.

As I said, those are walk-before-you run examples. They get more far-out - and newspaper editors will want to watch and evaluate examples such as:

Crowd-sourcing: Suppose you gave readers immediate access to the 600-page report from the latest local blue-ribbon panel? While you're poring over the document for its news value, you might invite readers to do the same. What questions do they have? Where do they see inconsistencies?

Community Web sites: Sisters The Indianapolis Star and The News Journal, Wilmington, Del., are leading the way for Gannett papers and TV stations in launching community Web sites dedicated to moms in their regions. They're putting content produced by the moms front-and-center. Look for other affinity-based and geographically based sites - such as the Chicago Tribune-sponsored TribLocal.

Beat-blogging: A form of crowd-sourcing? Perhaps. It's an experiment by NewAssignment.Net into creating a social network around particular beats. The idea: Encourage reporters to collaborate with a network of individuals connected with that beat. Isn't this what beat reporters already do? A blog centered on the notion answers: "Beat reporters have always had networks of sources, of course, but the sources haven't been connected to one another, or able to self-publish; they haven't been social networks at all." More at http://www.beatblogging.org/.

These are just a few ideas. Will some journalists resist? Sure. Nobody is trying to put traditional journalists out of a job. But as Jarvis has said, we must separate being a journalist from anyone's ability to commit an act of journalism. Let's find ways to make that collaboration happen.