In a previous post I talked about "citizen journalism." I traveled to Bakersfield, Calif., to observe The Voices - home-delivered tabloids of non-professional content published by The Bakersfield Californian. Although Bakersfield was a forerunner in this kind of citizen media, there are now dozens of other projects throughout the country, many of them outside Big Media companies.

This week's APME conference featured a session on citizen media called "New Voices, New Content."

This was the advertisement for the session: "Driven by need, despair or entrepreneurship, citizens are creating their own forms of small-j journalism to cover community news, and news organizations are finding traction in some of their techniques. Editors have a lot to learn from citizen-driven media."

Here are three more examples of citizen-produced news:

1. The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., has a team of "MoJos," or Mobile Journalists, who work out of their cars with wireless laptops and digital cameras. They work in 8 "micro-communities" around the greater Fort Myers area, reporting and writing intensely local neighborhood news. The four MoJos, all professionals, concentrate on volume, regularity and urgency.

They post stories continuously to micro-sites within the larger News-Press Web site. In other words, each micro-neighborhood has its own mini-Web site of information ranging from school news to crime blotters. They shoot their own pictures, post them to the Web, manage the Web sites, and recruit citizen-content providers.

In addition, 8 other reporters who regularly write for the newspaper's weekly neighborhood print sections also contribute content for the micro sights.

This is one way the paper creates the kind of hyper-local content that more and more people seem to demand from us, but isn't always easy to do in print. Some of the micro sites are small; there may not be hundreds of people regularly reading news from them. It wouldn't make sense to put that kind of limited and selective content into the traditional mass-market newspaper if only a handful of people care. But it does make sense to put it online where space is limitless and news is continuous.

This experiment has certainly changed our notion of journalists who go out into the field to report and then return to their newsrooms to write for both the paper and the Web. These MoJos are roaming their communities, almost professionally living in them, and their content is only seen on the Web.

The News-Press also is experimenting with something called "crowd sourcing," which is a mixture of professional and amateur reporters. For a recent investigation into a sewer controversy, the paper advertised for citizen help with the following invitation: "Help us Investigate."

Within 12 hours, 68 people responded to a forum site with information and commentary for the story. Within 24 hours, a reader in another country offered up a key confidential document that helped the paper 'break' the story. The citizen contributors were liberally credited for their help in subsequent stories on the Web and in the newspaper.

The newspaper also arranged a town hall meeting, but all the questions were posed by citizens. There were, however, several MoJos in the audience, covering the meeting for their micro-communities and posting continuous updates to the Web as questions were asked and answered. In all, more than 6,000 citizens contributed in some way to the project, through e-mails, phone calls, and interaction on a specially-created forum.

Example No. 2 is called The Forum, created by a group of non-journalist citizens in southeast New Hampshire who wanted more political news and analysis from the four local papers that served them. The result is a local online newspaper. The staff is volunteer except for one paid advertising rep. Most everyone has a regular job. They occasionally meet face-to-face to plan and manage content, but mostly communicate online. The Web site features 30 original stories per week from among 130 community contributors. In addition, they publish three newspapers a year; two are political in nature (candidate profiles, interviews, etc.) and the third is a summer events issue. They view the print product as a promotion to the Web. After a paper is published, their Web traffic increases.

This is no amateur effort; they offer RSS feeds, e-mail blasts, and have even tried video. They run this operation for the cost of their Internet service provider, although they received a New Voices grant from the J-Lab at the University of Maryland.

How do they measure success? Five ways.

1. Criticism. Welcome to our world! They hear from their fellow citizen-readers who ask, 'why didn't you cover such-and-such a story?' Editor Deborah Boisvert says that's how they know people are reading. But because they don't have resources to reallocate to cover stories people want, they end up co-opting the complainers to do it for them.

2. Increased electoral participation. Since the site's debut, more candidates have run for local offices and more people have turned out to vote.

3. Awards and recognition. How do you know when you've arrived? When you're invited to speak at a prestigious national journalism convention like APME.

4. Increased Web traffic.

5. The competition comes calling. Two of the four local papers in the region have increased their coverage in those small communities, and one of the four has started a neighborhood section of local stories in order to compete.

Boisvert, without intending to, is a MoJo in her own community, providing hyperlocal content to fill a previous void.

I've got to believe that the our local papers are doing more than an occasional story to compete. They should be thinking of ways to either acquire the operation, host the content on their official Web sites, or create a better product.

Example No. 2 is called Madison Commons in Madison, Wis., is a hyperlocal Web site like The Forum, but its content is not updated daily.

Lew Friedland, who runs the site and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, says a commons is owned by everyone, similar to a "village green." Everyone contributes. It's a community asset held in trust. It also operates on a New Voices grant, plus money from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Unlike The Forum, the Commons has media partners and community partners. Both The Capital Times and The Wisconsin State Journal exchange content with the site.

The exchange gives the Commons depth and variety and the papers get a connection in those communities and increased credibility.

The Commons is updated less frequently than The Forum. Stories on the Commons site are organized by neighborhoods and topics and tend to be more historical or contextual in nature. The site features bloggers, citizen-writers, UW-Madison student journalists and the media partners.

And in case professional journalists want to dismiss these amateur journalists as uninterested in the "craft," think again: The Commons offers its volunteers two training sessions a year that include an ethics component.

It would be easy to dismiss all three of these examples as low-level, small-j journalism that isn't worthy of our concern, but that would be wrong. Anytime you get a community of citizens interested enough in civic life to mobilize, work for free, even train themselves, then mass-market newspapers ought to pay attention.

We've got to harness this interest and either bring them into our tent and onto our Web sites or into our news pages, or we've got to give them a better product. Being dismissive won't stop that fact that entire conversations are going on without us.