Much has been written about the impact of "Citizen Journalists" -- bloggers who comment about the news and even create their own. But anyone interested in the future of journalism and therefore PR should read David Carr's column in the March 19 edition of the New York Times.

Mr. Carr talks about a new experiment between Wired.com and an NYU journalism professor that plans on tapping into a broad group of netizens to report on specific topics. The professor who started the project at zero.newsassigment.net calls it "pro-am journalism" where ordinary people will produce work that will be iterated and edited by experienced journalists. It is a little like applying the principles of Wikipedia to the practices of traditional journalism.

Given the growth of consumer generated media, consumer generated news makes perfect sense even if it radically alters the concept of a newspaper or a magazine. In the beginning, experiments like this may only produce a few "crowdsourced" articles that actually get published. But the potential for the future is staggering.

Today Wikipedia is the #1 online source for information. Why couldn't the same idea work for news? If it does, the PR business will change dramatically as the number of "reporters" explodes and we become only one of many resources that journalists rely upon.