To mix metaphors from one of those US crime shows, they’re in the house, going door to door, shining torches, looking for the prize we seem to be keeping from them.

Now, what are we going to do? At the moment, all i see mainstream journalists (and many journos-turned academics) doing is retreating deeper into the darkest corners of trait-based “professionalism”, locking doors behind them with words like “facts”, “ethics”, “equivalence” and the like. Journalists and academics such as these are holding the fort with references to citizen journalists such as “not real journalists”.

But the invaders are clearing rooms as they go through the house, turning on lights and managing the parts of the building they have liberated quite well thank you very much.

And now, there’s a choice at the last room, holding all the employed “mainstream” journalists: the new guys can break the door down and force the occupants to interact. Or they can simply board it up and get on with life without the dinosaurs.

Look at newspaper circulations in the Western world for the past 30 years. Look at the “close attention” our audiences pay to what mainstream employed journalists think, write and say. Look at the rise of audiences — paying audiences — for ANYTHING BUT mainstream journalism, such as Citizen journalism, but also blogs, YouTube and MySpace and FaceBook.

My gut feeling: the choice has already happened and that door’s been boarded up from the outside. Have a nice stay …

We had better turn this discourse around right away … that “public” and those “users” your contributors deride so glibly are in fact our customers, and they can clearly see the disdain and contempt in which providers such as “mainstream Fourth Estate” journalists hold them.

I’m getting very concerned about the growing portrayal of citizen journalists as “the negative other” by employed journalists … after all, employed journalists have a long and not very pretty reputation of negatively describing segments of society which threaten them (other races, women, ‘poor people’, ‘foreigners’ etc) and this is just the latest incarnation of a massive problem in the journalism profession … unreflective and unprofessional threatened behaviour.

My research and experience have come to show me that citizen journalists have reached the stage of proficiency, know-what, know-why and know-how that they are in a position to compete for audiences and revenue with employed journalists working for “mainstream” media. This is intensely exciting and reassuring for someone like me, who aims to form and graduate journalists of all kinds for the future, but not the many lazy, call-centre based journalists who seem to populate modern newsrooms of the present.

Of course, this phenomenon is at the same time an intense worry for Big Media conglomerates, but that’s their problem, yes?

So please, let’s begin referring to citizen journalists as colleagues, not deriding them as all being unskilled and unprofessional amateurs. There’s a lot of amateur-hour stuff going on in the mainstreams too … always has been.

And we in the university sector can get on with the job of forming lots of diverse people with the knowledge, technical skills and ethical guidelines so they can go forth and be journalists in the modern world … after all, this is what we really espouse, isn’t it: that journalism is a good thing for society? I’ve been in this business a long time and I have NEVER heard anyone in their right mind espouse that “mainstream journalism” alone is good for society.

I know comments are a nightmare to manage from an editor’s perspective. But I wonder what safeguards are in place that editors follow to make sure they aren’t using stolen photos.

When I look at the news organizations’ UGC areas, often what I find is an undifferentiated mess. You can’t search effectively, you can’t sort and tag.

Flickr’s ease of use has spoiled me, completely!