I like hearing about newspapers experimenting with user-generated content when the experiment involves mixing the am content with the pro content and/or putting it into the daily print edition.

The News and Observer is giving it a try now.

Howard Weaver rightly observes:

I have few illusions about this. As a guy who’s edited thousands of letters to the editor over the past 40 years, I know that the quality of both prose and accuracy will vary hugely, that reliability will be uneven at best, that many of the contributions will be self-serving and some may be unfair or simply wrong.

So what? We’ll learn to handle that, adding value by applying editing skills that a typical community news site won’t have. We’ll learn directly from readers what matters to them, helping us broaden horizons and be more genuinely responsive. It will breach some of the walls we thought were protecting “journalism” from the Visigoths, but really were just separating us from the audience.