More and more people are asking the basic question - "Is the mainstream media covering the stories that are important to me?"

The rise in prominence of people-powered news websites gives me a pretty clear answer - no. Well, at least for the millions and millions of people who are looking elsewhere for their news and opinion.

This is just the kind of question that Jason DeRusha asks in his recent article for Minnesota's CBS-4. Here's a little of what he has to say about it:

On the cusp of a presidential election, and the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, there's a move in Minnesota to train an army of citizen journalists.

"We want to be able to harness the power of citizen journalists for the good of the United States," said Jason Barnett, Executive Director and Founder of The UpTake.

According to Barnett - his organization is training over 100 people to be active citizen journalists. Although, I would tend to think that this is close to moving them out of the realm, it's something that could help raise the quality citizen journalism for the event in general.

It's websites like Uptake, Newsvine, OpEdNews, RedState, DailyKos, TownHall, and many others which are brining the writings of citizen journalists to people all over the world. In their own way each provides a space for virtually anyone to report - and the communities that read each site will often determine how much prominence an article will get.

The growth of sites like this is attracting the attention of some major backers too. It's the goal, for example, of the Knight News Challenge, which is giving away development cash of about $5 million for “innovative new media projects that serve the needs of local communities.” Proper funding, long an achilles heel for anyone trying to break into the news market, becomes less of an issue with funding projects like Knight's.

Recognizing that this kind of hi-tech citizen journalism will continue to grow as long as contributors believe they are making an impact, mainstream news outlets are becoming more and more ready to work with sites like these.

According to Associated Press Managing Editor for Sports and Multimedia Lou Ferrara , "More and more people are going to contribute stuff this way," he said. "We want to be in a position where we can capitalize on that."

And that's the key. If citizen journalists weren't providing something valuable - something that a lot of people wanted - there wouldn't be anything for a big business like the AP to want to capitalize on.

As long as the demand for this kind of reporting continues to grow I'm sure that more mainstream outlets will be looking to do the same.

--James Stone

I was looking over the tech news wires today when I came across what seems to be a great new release - MetaCarta Local Alerts Service for Publishers.  It's a service that "notifies users when there is new content that mentions the places they care about most."

This could be a powerful tool for online community development - as it can be used to inform people about news stories, classified ads, community events, restaurant reviews and even social media, related to their favorite city, town, or neighborhood.

Although it appears that the service is being targeted primarily for the delivery of advertising in order to increase local revenue, I can see how this application, when used properly, could transform the delivery of media as well.

Think about it - this type of feature could be used to deliver notices for everything from movie releases, local news stories, or alerts for political activists.  And, if cross-platform delivery is the goal (i.e. mobile devices), I believe it'll really take off.

From their press release, here's an overview of features:

--Personalized Geo-Targeted Content Delivery – Site visitors can receive personalized content that discusses the places and locations they designate as important.
--Automatic Geographic Data Extraction – Local Alerts identifies the places mentioned in unstructured content, in real time, making it easy to deliver it to specific users.
--Registration-based service – Local alerts is a registration-based service that enables a one-to-one relationship with users.
--Flexible Implementation – The solution comes with a registration based system or easily integrates to existing registration and email systems.
--Outsourced Solution – Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model offers rapid implementation and on-demand scalability.

It'll be interesting to see what developers will do with this.  Might be something that would fit in with the Knight News Challenge, which is giving away development cash of about $5 million for "innovative new media projects that serve the needs of local communities."

Seems to me that News Challenge and MetaCarte's Local Alerts go hand in hand.