When I found the web site Make Internet TV, I immediately got excited. It’s essentially a tutorial for creating your own video feeds and uploading them online, taking you from explaining the best way to shoot whatever you’re interested in, what editing software you can most easily access, how to properly license and publish your work, to ways to promote your new video. My excitement dulled a little when I read the site’s tagline, however: You make the news.

That shouldn’t seem like a mood-dampener, but it reminded me of what I left out when discussing how the Tampa Tribune laid off 5 percent of its workforce: the rise of citizen journalism, and the resulting waning of professional journalism. It’s cheaper for big publications to promote “you choose the news” or “you create the news” features instead of hiring more reporters to cover the news in various areas. While citizen journalism allows the people to record and post the latest goings-on in their neighborhoods online, its empowerment often comes at the cost of others’ jobs.

Another problem with citizen journalism is that it becomes a tool for PR and often blurs the lines of what’s newsworthy. For example, just because John Doe thinks that his little princess’ Sweet Sixteen at the bowling alley is the biggest event of the year — nay, decade — doesn’t mean that it should be the lead story (or that the rest of the community wants to wade through post after post about it). In addition, it can easily become a way for PR to reach the masses, because all Pete’s Rib Shack or Joe Schmo’s Car Wash has to do is upload their business information and post it as news, and voila! Suddenly an advertisement becomes the “news.”

Information Architecture may be able to fix all that, by employing multi-skilled journalists who can aggregate this information and edit out the advertisements and bury the unnewsworthy material that’s submitted. From there, the journalists can view these citizen-submitted ‘articles’ as tips, or things to look into and create possible in-depth articles or multimedia packages out of them. (Who knows, maybe John Doe rented the entire bowling alley for his daughter’s birthday and all of her guests will knock down gold-plated bowling pins while sipping soda out of crystal stemware imported from Italy and listening to Justin Timberlake crooning in the background. That could be newsworthy.)

The bottom line? It’s not enough to know how to write and edit articles anymore. Skillsets must expand, for the scope of this profession is expanding dramatically. Employers need to stop seeing the limitations of journalists and the price-cutting techniques of citizen journalism, and start seeing the unbridled possibilities that exist by using information architecture to build upon one’s foundation of journalism to net a wider audience.

By the way, here’s some interesting information on IA, and how it can be overlooked in many professions. Please ignore this guy’s seriously creepy way of presenting the information, but note his discussion on how great information architecture is often overlooked because the web sites or projects designed flow so smoothly that nobody needs to take note of them (it’s a lot easier for the untrained eye to notice things that are going wrong with a web site than the intricacies of design and development that haven’t posed problems):