The BBC publishes an interesting column by Dan Gillmor on how mainstream media can integrate the energy of citizen journalists into its newsgathering effort.

Gillmor draws on how a blogger organised his readers to harry their representatives to unpick a law which they felt protected Republican congressman Tom DeLay. Individually, the efforts would have had little impact; but gathered together on Joshua Micah Marshall's left-leaning Talking Points Memo blog, they helped to overturn the law. DeLay resigned last week. While it might be overdoing things to suggest that bloggers brought him down in the same way conservative citizen journalists made several media executive positions unsustainable in 2004, it's fair to say that Talking Points contributors played a small but significant role in DeLay's downfall.

Political organising is one thing - see yesterday's lead for how blogging is made for campaigning - but newsgathering is quite another. There's quite a lot of resistance to the idea of incorporating citizen journalists into any newsgathering effort, beyond the traditional inclusion of eyewitness reports and, more recently, photographs taken by bystanders. One leading academic and columnist describes work by non-professionals as "raw material rather than finished product, and opinion-givers in an echo chamber of like-minded amateurs."

This may be so: Following links around many politically-minded weblogs can be a depressing exercise, with a seemingly endless supply of anti-Bush and anti-liberal rants all confirming one another.

But what makes a partisan newspaper columnist any more of a "finished product" than a well-written and observant blog post? And, in a democracy of voices, even the bottom-feeding rantings of the worst bloggers have as much right to be read and distributed as a professional columnist's op-ed.

Indeed, one could argue that blogs are a refreshing return to the days of pamphleteering after decades of paternalistic observations from broadsheet columnists. Clever newspapers, says Gillmor, "should be aiming to help their communities engage in that (emergent global conversation), via blogs, podcasts, discussion boards and all of the other conversational tools."

Gillmor argues that citizen journalists can help build a broader picture of any story. Take the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Gillmor says that the rebuilding of New Orleans is "too big a story for any professional media company to cover in a thorough way."

"They should be asking the citizens of the affected communities for help, but as far as I can tell they aren't even making the attempt, and are thereby missing an enormous opportunity."

Journalists shouldn't worry about their position if citizens get a voice in the conversation - most citizens who contribute the odd story don't want to be full-time journalists anyway, and the need for the best work of professionals won't go away anytime soon. But it would be foolish to argue against the reality that the "old systems are expanding" - news organisations should learn "new ways to gather, sift and recombine what we know and learn together."

UPDATE: Some broadcasters are working with mobile phone operators to make citizen journalism easier still. The Guardian reports that ITN and Sky News are in talks with a mobile operator to take feeds directly from citizen journalists armed with video-enabled mobile phones and broadcasting them directly on their news programming.