Moderator Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch started out my recalling users commenting on her weblog who suggested that she should keep her personal opinions to herself. Hmm. That's the ultimate truth of user-generated journalism, an environment in which not only are users primary authors they're part of an extended conversation that is moving journalism towards a much more conversational framework. Panelists included Jim Debth of The American-Stateman, Susan DeFife of Backfence.com, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and Roger Simon of Pajamas Media. Jeff pointed out that Bambi's experience was indeed indicative of how users are an essential part of the online journalism equation: "In this new world, anyone can find a wiki to communicate online, or let's blog the conference. You, the people, have power. It's about people making connections. The people have control. If you fight that, you will lose. We used to control the pipes, but those days are over."

Jim Debth provided an "old media " perspective, emphasizing that "The Internet is here. Don't be a bystander." That seems to be the main theme for many things at the conference this year: the Web is no longer anything that can be finessed indefinitely by most publishers as a secondary revenue stream. Luckily for Jim, Pluck's office was just a few blocks away in Austin, TX, which helped to get them thinking about how to use weblogs and RSS feeds to drive more revenue from classifieds and other ad sources. The Statesman's weblogs use Multiple levels of authorship rights that help them and their users to control the publishing of content. There are staff blogs, community blogs, opinion blogs (op-eddish content) on a wide variety of topics, all of which get prominent displays. So far this makes for 600 webloggers producing more than 1,700 blogs - tons of new page inventory with focused community value. "We've just scratched the surface," Jim notes; given the potential for community value

Roger Simon's 90 affiliated webloggers are providing a daily reach in the millions and growing steadily according to Alexa, with Nielsen data confirming their own internal numbers according to Roger. Roger tries to locate webloggers from across the spectrum, he claims, but sees that they've been labeled a "center-right publication." They are trying to grow their network of weblogs fairly slowly, having grown from about 70 weblogs at their launch last Fall. Pajamas Media is more of a referral service than a weblog, with a thin layer of editorial content that points readers to affiliated weblogs. Will this work as a business model? We'll see, but it is managing to build traffic fairly effectively.

Susan outlined the growth of Backfence.com, at which the home page listing of city communities on the service is managed and the rest is given to the users to post news articles, classifieds, local events listings, photos and comments, with plenty of safeguards in place to try to backstop bad behavior but it's for a very small fraction of contributions. It's a community taking care of itself on a collaborative basis, self-policing to some degree because it's people in your own community who know you anyway.

What should a front page look like in user-generated media? Jeff recommended digg as a good example because you get a sense of what people care about and to provide feedback that matters to a community. "If you give over control to the users, you will succeed," Jeff notes. Jim sees that people on weblogs take more responsibility for the quality of their postings than do people in their paper's online discussion groups, providing him a sense that giving users some control over their own content will provide a certain degree of self-policing.

Webloggers can cover stories that the mainstream media may ignore, which gives opportunities for services such as Pajamas Media to help drive users towards stories that they believe are important and to drive webloggers towards them. Roger doesn't see user-generated journalism driving out mainstream journalism; given the immense range of content sources being provided by users, including photos from community events, and other types of content that are not the focus of traditional journalists. Roger sees video being a "killer app" for online content, which is going to add to the din. Jeff gave the example of the famous CNN walk-off by Robert Novak, which had probably a few hundred thousand people watching it live but has had tens of millions of downloads from various weblogs. The "Star Wars Kid" phenomenon is alive and well and creating repurposable video of intense interest very quickly and effectively via the attention of weblogs.

How to motivate people for all of these activities? Dan Gillmor, pioneer of citizens' journalism, had to pull back from his own efforts at Bayosphere to get people to generate content, underestimating both the business aspects of running such and effort as well as the tools and shoe leather required to get a community to buy in to such a concept enough to sustain it with content and ads. Some users will be interested in compensation, but in the instance of The American-Statesman the payback is an audience that can be drawn to featured webloggers. Jim's not sure that compensation via ad revenues is in the immediate picture, but "we may entertain the idea" at some time down the road.

Beyond weblogging there are tools such as Flikr to organize photos and podcasting networks, adding to the soup of content that must be indexed, tagged and otherwise organized into useful forms. User ratings are a key component of this sorting process, but it's early days to get audiences large enough at the local level to make that an effective tool. There will be quality control issues, to be sure, but as Susan pointed out mistakes and outright deception are well-known traits of professional journalists as well, unfortunately. A key plus of weblogs pointed out by Roger is that oftentimes feedback may be caustic but it will be generally immediate - something that doesn't always happen with a mainstream media outlet, even with fact-checkers and public editors.