This is actually a catch-up from earlier this week, which has turned out to be Citizen Journalism and Confidential Sources Week.

The yarn is from the Washington Post and is about burgeoning efforts to make money by getting citizens to provide editorial content for nothing -- or close to it. :)

An excerpt:

When fire destroyed a historic building in Brattleboro, Vt., in the wee hours of Saturday, the local daily newspaper had already been put to bed. But by dawn, local residents had posted photos and their own stories about the blaze on iBrattleboro.com, a local Web site where anyone can write the news.

Residents in the town of 12,000 spent the weekend using the site to publicly discuss ways to help the 11 people who had been hurt or displaced -- and even look for lost cats.

"It served its purpose," said site co-creator Christopher Grotke. "For many people, it was the only place to find any news throughout the day."

One-year-old iBrattleboro.com is at the vanguard of the latest wave of Web publishers trying to build audiences by delivering local news. What's different about their efforts from those in the past is that they are relying on a new ally: local residents.

Several notable ventures have launched or raised money this year to create local news sites online in which readers contribute all or most of the news. The big idea is that citizen-generated content lowers costs and creates more loyal audiences.

The Brattleboro site hasn't sold many ads yet -- Grotke says it's still mostly a labor of love, though he hopes it might turn a profit one day.

Others are bullish on the business prospects for citizen journalism. Advocates say do-it-yourself Web news supported by advertising is more viable today than in the 1990s -- back when Microsoft shuttered its Sidewalk network of entertainment guides and the rival CitySearch network went deeply into the red. That's because more people are online, and they're using faster connections and growing increasingly comfortable posting their thoughts via forums, blogs and other formats. The dream of local Web entrepreneurs is to reel in a new generation of hyper-local advertisers -- those dry cleaners and car washes that rarely advertise in big, daily newspapers.

"The business strategy is if we can get a critical mass of very local content and a local audience, then we can target ads better than we ever could down to a town level," said Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, the Internet arm of Advance Publications.

The article also talks about the Northwest Voice, an experimental project run by the Bakersfield Californian, a 65,000-circ. daily located about 18 km. northwest of Los Angeles.

In clicking on the link just now, there's a story -- OK, a graphic -- about homes that have sold recently. And it's by ... First American Real Estate Solutions!

There's a streeter about Christmas wishes!!

This is groundbreaking stuff!!! -- although I thought stories touting businesses were verbotten. Not if you're subtle about it, I guess.

And when I went to look at more, one of them registration thingees popped up, and that's as far as it went for me.

The following graf explains why the paper sees this site as a good thing:

"One of our business goals was to grow our reach among small and medium-sized businesses in the community who could not afford to be in the daily newspaper or preferred not to be," said Mary Lou Fulton, publisher of the Northwest Voice (and a former editor of washingtonpost.com). "In a typical edition of Northwest Voice, 40 to 50 percent of our advertisers are new or were infrequent [newspaper] advertisers.' "

Leaving aside the question of filthy lucre for a moment, how should journalists look at these creations.

My sense is that journalists should applaud them. It should free reporters up to do real journalism that requires real skills. Christmas wishes? You shouldn't need a reporter to do those.

But the question that does worry me is how publishers and senior editors see these things.

If they get the impression that soft, slice-of-life stuff is what local markets really want, then why staff newsrooms with whiny, expensive prima donnas who only want to write stuff that only their journo buddies want to read?

Alas, it's getting too late to give more consideration to this issue.

Anyway, two recent, related posts:

First wikipedias, now wikinews

Dan Gillmor to start citizen journalism venture