Journalism by the People for the People

An fascinating article out of British Columbia demonstrates how open media sites like Wikipedia may represent the future of citizen journalism...

On the morning of September 1, 2004, a small armed force captured a school in western Russian town of Beslan, taking hundreds of students hostage. One day later, a small article describing the event appeared on Wikipedia.org, an open-source encyclopedia. Over the next 24 hours, Wikipedia users compiled the information from other news reports together into one article, revising and expanding it 46 times.

People coming to the article from Wikipedia's "Current Events" page could read a concise summary of the event, with links to the history of the region and the ongoing war. This was old school, just-the-facts reporting.