According to Wikipedia, ‘Crowdsourcing’ describes the process of taking a task, traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large, group of the community.

I can see most employers embracing it as a fantastic new concept, despite get-mugs-to-work-for-free being a well-established business model!

But you wouldn’t expect the Guardian, with its socialist ideals, to engage in social exploitation, yet they seem to be giving crowdsourcing a go.

Instead of paying for professional photographers to cover last week’s 2009 Climate Camp, the Guardian setup a Flickr group to encourage people to upload their photos to document the event – I’d never heard of the event either!

We’ll assume it’s a bunch of hippies in tents, who need some Taser-wielding police action and possibly a death to raise their profile, but that’s enough free PR advice from me.

So is the Guardian’s journalistic crowdsourcing a breakthrough in democracy or simply a wage cutting exercise?

Given they are already at loggerheads with the National Union of Journalists for stopping the image reuse fees they paid photographers, I’m suspicious.

I personally never understood why when you bought a photograph, you couldn’t use it at liberty. Would you buy a chair if you had to pay a fee every time someone sat in it?  No, but I digress.

Citizen journalism, be it photographic or written in the form of a blog is an increasingly important part of the changing news landscape.  Although breaking news will often be distributed by Twitter and analysis delivered by the blogopshere, it is usually through traditional journalism that the initial story is unearthed.

In my mind, there is no question that society needs professional journalism, just how it will be funded in the digital age seems to be in doubt.

Paying for news online is an anathema that is unlikely to change.  However, charging for investigation, insight and expert opinion on that news is more likely to survive the social media revolution.

We also have to understand the difference between reporting news and investigative journalism. One documents news and the other makes it.

It may be possible to crowdsource the former using social networks, but almost certainly not the latter.