Topix is looking for volunteer human editors to help its news-aggregation site.

An excerpt from the AP story on globeandmail.com:

Topix LLC is soliciting editors to oversee the forums covering every U.S. town and city. One or more volunteers from each of 32,500 localities will be in charge of marking the best messages and news items and perhaps writing their own articles on community happenings.

The idea is to tap the power of citizen journalists — everyday Internet users who may write a quick message on a corner traffic accident or complain about delays in garbage collection. Some of that is happening in the forums now, but those posts get buried among the more mundane writeups.

That's where the volunteer editors will come in. After undergoing an application process and screening by Topix staff, editors will be able to handpick their favorite items and move them to a blog-like section. All the other posts will remain elsewhere on the site, should someone really want to sift through them.

 “We have 35,000 posts a day,” said Rich Skrenta, Topix' co-founder and chief executive. “Let's find the best of them here and let that person promote that to the news stream for the rest of us.”

He acknowledged user-generated news “is not fact-checked (or) edited and tends to be raw, in the words of the people posting it, but it comes in great quantity and it's very current.”

Software will still try to identify the most relevant news items for areas without a volunteer editor.

Topix began as an aggregation site for news stories and represents one of several efforts aimed at helping people assemble news items from a variety of sources online rather than rely on a single media outlet, as was the case with the printed newspaper or a TV network's evening news.

Topix isn't being run from someone's basement. Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune hold a collective 75 per cent stake in it.

It's worth noting Topix isn't the first to try this approach. About.com has always used "guides," as they call them. I believe they are now paid freelancers, but they may have started off as volunteers (please, someone correct me if I'm wrong).

The New York Times Co. owns About.com.