Write the news yourself!

Back in the old days - pre-2005 - community activist Amy Gahran had three ways to reach readers of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo.: She could persuade a reporter to quote her, write a letter to the editor, or buy an ad.

Now, the Internet has provided a fourth option, and Ms. Gahran wants to take advantage of it. She plans to recruit a "citizen journalism reporting team" to cover a controversial housing development - and post its work on the Daily Camera's website.

Her unpaid volunteers won't have reporting experience, but she's not worried. "The skills involved in creating journalism are underappreciated, but they aren't particularly rocket science," says Gahran, a freelance writer.

Ordinarily, a planned infiltration like this one would send editors rushing to barricade the door. But the Daily Camera's online chief says he welcomes Gahran's efforts, and he has plenty of company. In several communities across the United States, newspapers are encouraging amateur writers to fill their websites with content ranging from diatribes to serious reporting. On Friday, the venerable Los Angeles Times joined the parade, allowing Web denizens to rewrite its daily editorials en masse.

This development raises profound questions about the news biz and its evolution - from what role a newspaper should play in its community (opinion leader versus discussion facilitator) to what "professional" standards should apply to nonprofessionals. Will editors accustomed to tight control ever adjust to the free-wheeling world of the Internet? Will online users view tradition-bound newspapers as anything but clueless has-beens? And finally, will the online world ultimately boost the industry's sagging fortunes?

For now, Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Andrés Martinez isn't too worried about the last question. Instead, he's watching to see if a new creature called a "wikitorial" is a success or, as the Times itself puts it, an experiment that might be bound for "the dumpster of embarrassing failures."

"Wiki" refers to wikipedia.com, an online encyclopedia that allows users to rewrite its entries, for free, whenever they feel like it. The notion, says Mr. Martinez, "is that if you have something that is communally built from scratch, you might end up with a comprehensive truth."

Wikipedia.com has become a raging success, gaining respect for its reliability and spawning 600,000 entries in English and hundreds of thousands more in languages from Korean and Finnish to Hebrew and Esperanto. Not surprisingly, "wikinews" has appeared, too, allowing amateur reporters to collectively write articles about current events.

The wikitorial is similar, allowing Times readers to go online and edit a single editorial a day. The wikitorial is continually updated to reflect the revisions, like a word-processing document that undergoes multiple rounds of editing.

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