Amateurs may be the future of journalism, but can we count on them?

Timothy Lee has a post from March 25 at TechDirt about the future of hyperlocal news.

Lee tells us something that we already know: the Web provides a decentralized framework that will easily support a disorganized news system that doesn't look much like the hierarchical one that currently runs the paper-dominated journalism industry.

Rather than a handful of professional reporters writing stories and an even smaller number of professional editors deciding which ones get printed, we're moving toward a world that Clay Shirky calls publish, then filter: anyone can write any story they want, and the stories that get the most attention are determined after publication by decentralized, community-driven processes like Digg, del.icio.us, and the blogosphere.

It's the attention economy, the one you've read about, the one that's going to be increasingly important in the years go come. It's an economy where the most popular (and hopefully the most worthy) news items get featured, while the crap sinks to the bottom of the barrel.

Central to this system will be the amateur reporter, who selflessly donates his or her time and makes a tiny contribution to the news-stream.

You don't need to be a professional reporter to write a blog post every couple of weeks about your local city council meeting. Nor do you need to be a professional editor to mark your favorite items in Google Reader. Yet if millions of people each contribute small amounts of time to this kind of decentralized information-gathering, they can collectively do much of the work that used to be done by professional reporters and editors.

Lee's message is this: While the pros are smart and capable, they are outnumbered by the amateurs, who by the weight of their numbers, will out-proliferate even the most die-hard professional journalists.

I just have to wonder this, though: Can we count on the amateurs to do the mundane work, like the city council meetings or the numerous filings that beat reporters get paid to read through? In this system, we have to count on people to want to share what they learn after they get home from whatever public meeting they went to?

If that your first thought when you get home from a public meeting? I imagine it might be if you have a stake in the things discussed at the meeting, but then again, if you have a personal stake in the meeting, should you really be filing stories about it?

Related posts:

1. On Michael Hirschorn and the future of daily print journalism
2. I’m the future of journalism because...
3. Twitter without a follower count?
4. Pat Thornton: Journalism needs to get down and dirty
5. What Twitter did for crisis journalism today