Any doubt as to the veracity and longevity of citizen journalism was all but erased with the recent announcement that the Associated Press is teaming up with NowPublic.com, the world’s largest indy media collective.

Despite mainstream media’s (MSM) fall from grace in the digital world, the AP continues to be pretty formidable as a global news gathering network with 4,000 employees based in 240 bureaus across 97 countries. Impressive until you consider NowPublic and its *60,000* contributors spanning 140 countries.

NowPublic is one of many social media networks spawned in part by the proliferation of digital gadgets like camera and video phones to gather news and the advent of affordable broadband for easy and instantaneous global distribution of news.

Remember the first images of the South Asia tsunami, the London Underground bombings or even Saddam Hussein’s execution? It wasn’t CNN or AP who broke those stories, it was everyday people.

To its credit the AP has decided to embrace the undeniable clout of citizen media and in the process might stand a chance to survive the “MSM meltdown.” In some respects, all the AP is doing is casting a much wider net for the quasi-journalist stringers that have been the backbone of the network since its early days.

What remains to be seen with this and other MSM-citizen media experiments is whether the old guard media pros will raise the game of amateur journalists in everything from general aptitude to objectivity and ethics. Or will the untrained stringers bastardize the purity of journalism and the unbiased role of the watchdog press as the line between editorial and opinion is increasingly blurred.

Either way, it’s critical that communication professionals sit up and take notice. Those hacks that you thought were just blogosphere background noise are gaining credibility –- read by millions and now endorsed by the forefathers of traditional media, in fact incorporated into the very system of MSM.

In the digital world of reference-based communication, these folks are shaping opinion that drives consumer purchase decisions, brand loyalty or derision and the general daily buzz of what’s hot/not.

If your media relations plans don’t include citizen journalists, time to get into revision mode. If your execs are clueless on the impact of citizen media, time to get them up to speed on 21st century communications. To ignore this group is to bury one's proverbial head in the digital sand.