Storming the News Gatekeepers

But others argue that journalism is enriched through the perspectives of everyday Joes and Janes, who offer more voices, more texture to public debate. And that we're all the better for it.

Mitchell Stephens, who teaches media history at New York University, says citizen journalism harks back to the days of spoken news, when communities gathered in open-air markets and town squares. It can be traced to Thomas Paine and the pamphleteers of the 18th century, and to the antiwar, counterculture alternative press that prospered in the 1960s.

A citizen journalist, Stephens notes, is not the same as a political blogger. The former can, and sometimes does, original reporting; the latter, for the most part, is a political junkie armed with opinions and has no bones about sharing them. But these definitions don't always fit.

"There really is no simple definition for what a citizen journalist is, just lots and lots of examples," says Dan Gillmor, former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People."

"It ranges from people who do journalism all the time to people who do what you might call a random act of journalism to people who don't consider themselves journalists but are in fact practicing journalism.

"The publishing tools -- digital cameras, blogging software -- are at the people's disposal," Gillmor continues. "And for a lot of them, the underlying motivation is frustration with the traditional media."

Take Anderson.

Now off the D train, Ms. CJ continues with her rant. Her voice, low and pointed, grows more incredulous as she steps out of the subway and onto the streets of Brooklyn. She's railing against illegal immigration -- "What part of illegal," she snaps, "don't you get?" -- and wonders where the MSMers are in covering this "big, big, big" story.

After the Democratic debate in Philadelphia earlier this month, when Sen. Hillary Clinton was criticized for her response to a question about granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, Anderson wrote on her blog: "If [Clinton] is the nominee, Republicans will go buck-wild with attack ads showing she was for licenses for illegals before she was against it."

Tall and striking, Anderson was raised in the poor, rough streets of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and first set foot on an airplane on her way to California to attend Stanford Law School. She looks like a cross between Meryl Streep, Chita Rivera and Pam Grier, with physical features as hard as to pin down as her politics. She grew up a Democrat, switched to the Republican Party in the Reagan years and bolted out of the GOP in 2000, following the election debacle that angered her to her core. She's been an independent ever since and supports none of the candidates right now.

Journalism, as political MSMers in Washington practice it, is too inside-the-Beltway, too beholden to sources, Ms. CJ says, all about the horse race, the money haul, the strategists, the pollsters, all about ensuring that official Washington and its political class stay employed.

"And not enough about the issues," Anderson points out, "never enough about the issues." She blogs about illegal immigration constantly and wrote extensively about the Jena Six case well before the MSM started covering the racial conflicts seething in that small Louisiana town. She credits black bloggers, alongside black radio, with closely following that story.