There is a great piece on Citizen Journalism in the October PC Magazine.

"Citizen journalism...is like professional baseball...it's just not practical. You can't play professional baseball just because you think the Mariner's stink. You're not good enough to play. Yes, bloggers have been breaking news stories here and there, but it's usually because they amplify something that media professionals have already written about but that was ignored by the major media. Bloggers, millions of gadflies, have been hounding Big Media.

The main reason these anti-Big Media initiatives have appeared is that the media are seen as letting us down in every way. Big Media picks the wrong stories, so we have to use Digg to find the right ones. The media's news-gathering problems aren't going to be solved by bloggers or citizen journalists.

Newspapers are not disrespected and dying because of their reporters. The business model is the problem. They have cut investigative and international reporting significantly. They are top-heavy with entertainment-news coverage and excessive pandering to advertisers to meet corporate bottom-line requirements. Pandering means not just writing softball articles but creating an uncritical editorial cushion of fluff upon which advertisers can feel comforted. And there is the pervasive fear of offending the reader with reality."

John Dvorak.

The problem for libraries is that as demand for traditional media content falls, libraries are unable to replace it with new media content, due to technical considerations, licensing issues and the like. So in the end, library collections loose traction in the marketplace, and patronage falls, no matter how good our servcies are or how hard we try. We're not in control of our destiny.