Spreadin' the news, 1 volunteer at a time

Brandon Stafford is a 32-year-old mechanical engineer and summer camp counselor interested in Africa. But occasionally, the Cambridge resident grabs a digital camera and notebook, hits the streets, and returns to write a story for Wikinews.org.

''I just wish I could get more local news," Stafford said. ''Sometimes I expect someone to go, 'Wait a minute! You're not a real newspaper reporter,' but that hasn't happened yet."

Stafford writes for Wikinews, a news website written and edited by volunteer reporters that aims to become an alternative to wire services like the Associated Press or Reuters for unbiased news.

Traditional news organizations, already coping with shrinking circulation and free distribution of their content over the Internet, now face another threat -- free labor. Websites like Wikinews hope to mobilize armies of citizens who will do for free what traditional news organizations do for vast amounts of money.

For now, Wikinews's greatest advantage is also a vital flaw. Its volunteer contributors write whatever they want to write, focusing on obscure stories of personal interest while sometimes completely missing stories of national interest. Not only do Wikinewsies -- as Wikinews reporters are known -- write articles, they edit their peers' articles and choose what stories to put at the top of the page.

The ''wiki" system of allowing readers to change existing articles, which is unique to Wikinews, also makes the site vulnerable to vandalism. When The Los Angeles Times attempted to create its own ''Wikitorial" that could be rewritten and edited by readers online last Friday, the site was flooded with pornographic images, forcing the company to take the editorial down just two days later.

But look to South Korea to see what the movement can become. There, 38,000 citizen journalists contribute about 200 articles per day to OhmyNews.com, a wildly successful news website that a national magazine recently ranked the sixth most influential South Korean media organization.

The organization's volunteer news reporters get paid between $2 and $20 per article -- a paltry amount compared to regular freelance rates. OhmyNews now employs a couple dozen full-time editors and reporters to supplement the volunteers.

The result? A wide-reaching news organization that rivals any traditional news source in South Korea and operates with low costs. OhmyNews.com publisher Jean K. Min expects the website, which now has an English companion site, to bring in about $10 million in revenue this year.

OhmyNews's successful model has raised eyebrows in the United States, where many newspapers are contemplating their own citizen journalism offshoots.

''I'm very optimistic," said Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wales also founded Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by online visitors. The nonprofit relies completely on volunteers for content production and editing and on grants and donations to keep the website running.

The number of active contributors has grown to almost 200 since Wales started the site in December. (The name comes from the Hawaiian term ''wiki wiki," meaning quick or informal.)

''It's one of the biggest and hottest topics right now among newspapers," said Rob Runett, director of electronic media communications for the Newspaper Association of America. ''From a revenue perspective, advertisers will watch this because they go where the customers are."

Mark Potts, cofounder of Backfence.com, doesn't want to create the next AP. Backfence.com now has sites for the Washington-area towns of McLean and Reston, Va. and hopes to expand the model to communities nationwide.

''We're hyper-local," said Potts, who was previously an editor and reporter for The Washington Post. ''We're 'What happened at the fire at the bowling alley? What does a house sell for?' "

Because all of the content for the sites is user-submitted, Backfence's expenses are limited to the cost of keeping the website running and selling advertisements. Revenue will come strictly from ads, and Potts said they've already sold six ads in their first two months of operation.

Anna Eberly, the director of the Claude Moore Colonial Farm at Turkey Run in McLean, Va., said her privately operated historic park could not afford to buy ads in the local newspaper, but had no problem finding $100 per month to advertise on Backfence. ''We're a national park but a lot of our support is local," she said.

Many newspapers are trying out their own citizen news sites. The Denver Newspaper Agency, which publishes The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, released YourHub.com, a series of news sites written mainly by readers and supplemented with material written by YourHub.com staff. Every week, many stories and photos are taken from certain YourHub.com websites and printed in zoned paper editions delivered to Post and News subscribers. Officials at other suburban newspapers in the Denver area have subsequently started their own citizen journalism sites to compete with YourHub.com.

''These sources just add to the competition that local papers face online," said Greg Sterling, an analyst for local media for The Kelsey Group in Princeton, N.J. ''These upstart entities have a new cost structure, and they are cannibalizing the traditional ones."

Advertisements in the print version of YourHub.com are a fraction of the price for advertisements in The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, partly because different editions of the paper are distributed to different ''zones" or communities within the Denver market. One advertisement in The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News that would cost about $21,000 would run for about $1,400 in a zone of YourHub.

The sections have been so popular among advertisers that the first issues have been up to twice as long as originally projected, said Kirk MacDonald, president and chief executive of the Denver Newspaper Agency. John Temple, who is editor, publisher, and president of the Rocky Mountain News, said he expects some issues to be 100 percent reader-contributed content soon.

The wave is just getting started. Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org, a popular online classified ads website, said he's spoken to professional journalists about citizen journalism.

Newmark, who said craigslist is probably already affecting classified ads sales in newspapers, said he is not sure if craigslist.org's next incarnation will be as a citizen journalism website, but that he's happy to ''make some noise" on the movement's behalf. ''The economics of the news business is changing," he said. ''No matter what happens, there is definitely a lot of change happening."

Joe Light can be reached at jlight@globe.com.