Reporting's mass appeal

A woman in Venice Beach reviews "The Lion King" and declares it the best musical she's seen -- of the four she's ever seen. In Dallas, a group of professional reporters and "citizen journalists" collaborate on a federal government expose. And a Milwaukee news magazine's experiment with amateur reporters yields fresh insights into city planning, fire department politics and "taco butt," that unsightly parting of the derriere caused by too-tight denim inseams.

Is this the future of journalism?

Across the country "citizen newspapers" are springing up, full of promise, energy and atrocious spelling errors. They're largely written by unpaid, untrained and unedited citizen reporters, who say they "commit acts of journalism" more for kicks than out of a sense of civic calling.

In Los Angeles, one of those revolutionaries is Ariel Vardi, 24, an Israeli by way of France, who has no journalism training and doesn't think much of his own writing abilities ("I'm more of a photographer. I'm not fluent in English").

Vardi is the founder and editor of BrooWaha, an online collection of news, reviews and opinion pieces that purports to cover Los Angeles the way professional media don't. The site is edited by Vardi in the evenings, when he comes home from his job as a software engineer. He says he doesn't check for quality or accuracy. He just makes sure the site is devoid of advertisements, fiction pieces and pornography.

"I am just trying to get as much information for L.A. as I can and give readers the opportunity to choose what they find interesting," Vardi said.

This month Reuters, the world's largest international multimedia news agency, partnered with Yahoo to create You Witness News, a site where amateur photojournalists can upload their work for display on Reuters.com and Yahoo News. These works are as varied as pictures of Santa Claus pinatas in Mexico and firefighters battling a blaze in Moorpark. All are being sifted through by Reuters editors, and anything of value to mainstream media might be purchased and reprinted.

That Reuters has chosen to begin this experiment with photography is significant. Photos typically don't lie, and part of the success of a photographer is being at the right place at the right time: Charles Porter, then a 25-year-old loan specialist, won the Pulitzer Prize for his iconic shot of a firefighter cradling the body of a dead baby after the Oklahoma City bombing.