A WEB of opinions

ABOARD THE crowded D train, rumbling into Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, the inevitable rant explodes. A rant courtesy of Faye Anderson, whom we'll call Ms CJ, aka Citizen Jourrnalist. A rant directed at us, Mr MSM, aka Mainstream Meida, for all our perceived faults.

"It's not you, the journalist, it's the institutin," Ms CJ tells Mr MSM. "You're not telling the whole story...You've lost your creditbility..."

We listen, take notes, check if the tape recorder's working. No telling what Anderson might do if she's misquoted.

She's saying anyone can be a jornalist, at least anyone with an Internet connection. Start a blog, she says, tht's easy.

Citizen journalism is giving voice to those who, in the pre-Internet era, may have felt voiceless. But some challenge the value of all this citizen involvement. Is it really " journalism" ? Are "they" really "journalists"? What's the difference between citien journalists and bloggers who write about politics?

"The term 'citizen journalist' has an Orwellian ring to it," says Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur', who's criticised the Web 2.0 - Wikipedia world, where everyone can become their own editors.

"People are becoming Big Brother, either with a camcorder or a keyboard, and following the candidates around. It's ridiculous. You can't just be a great journlist, the same way you can't be a great chef or a great soccer player."

Journalists, he continues," "follow a set of standards, a code of ethics. Obejectivity rules. That's not the case with citizen journalists.Anything goes in that world."

And sometimes the facts go out the window.

Others argue that journalism is enriched through everyday Joes and Janes, ho offer more voices, more texture to pulic debate.

Michell Stphens, who teaches media history at New York University, says citizen journlism harks back to the days of spoken news, when communities gathered in open-air markets and twon squares. It can be traced to Thomas Paine and the pamphleteers of the 18th century, and to the antiwar, counter-culture alternative press that prospered in teh 1960s.

A citizen journalist, Stephemns notes, is not the same as a political blogger. The former can, and sometimes does, original reporting: the latter, for the most part, is a political junkie armed with opinion. But these definitions don't always fit.

"There really is no simple definition for waht a citizen journalist is, just lots and lots of examples," says Dan Gillmor, former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of "we the Media: Grassorots Journlism by the People, for the People".

"It ranges from people who do journalism all teh time to people who do what you might call a random act of journalism to people who don't consider themselves journalists but are in fact practisig j ournalism.

"The publishing tools - digigal cameras, blogging software-are at the people's disosal," Gillmor continues. "And for a lot of them, the underlying motivation is frrustration with teh traditional media."

Take Anderson.

Now off the D Train, Ms CJ continues with her rant as she steps onto the streets of Brooklyn. She's railing against ilegal immigration - "What part of illegal," she snaps, "don't you get?" - and wonders where the MSMers aer in coverig this "big, big" story.

Tall and strking, anderson was raised in Brooklyn's rough Beddford - Stuyvesant neighbourhood and first set foot on an aeroplane on her way to California to attend Stanforf Law School. She looks like a cross between Meryl Streepk, Chita Rivera and Pam Grier, with physical features as hard as to pin down as her politics. She grew up a Democrat, swithed to the Republican Party in teh Reagan years and bolte out of teh GOP in 2000, following the election debacle. Now an independent, she supports none of the candidates.

Politics is, Ms CJ says, all about the horse rece, the money haul, teh strategists, the pollsters, all about ensuring that official Washington and its political class stay employed.

Citizen journalism, she says, is her enty into teh political process, a way for "an outsider like me to play some sort of role" - curious statement since she herself is a former Washington player, a policy wonk who once served as the face of the Republican Party to African Americans, a regular on C-SPAN's Washington Journal". But those days are over.

"Washington was physically making me sick," Anderson explains.

So she collected a list of clients for ther policy consulting business and returned to Brooklyn. For almost three years, nderson's been a full-time policy consultant and citizen journalist.

Anderson at large is nowhere near as widely read orr heavily linked as RedState or Daily Kos, America's popular conservative and liberal blogs. Technorati, which tracks a site's number of links, says Anderson's blog has received 236 blog mentions, while RedState and Daily Kos have received 21,000 and 107,000, respectively.

But Anderson points to other successes. She's the first blogger to beling to the Trotter Group, a 15-year -old association of well-known black journalists. And last summer, she was credentialed to cover the CDemocratic debate at Howard University.

Says Anderson: "Look, everyone's trying to analyse what citizen journalism is, what its impact will be in this election. We, the citizen journalists, ae figuring it out. You mainstream media folks are figuring it out. But whatever it is, there's no going back. We're here. Get used to it."