City Bureau's "documenters" — a step in the right direction for citizen journalism

Interesting move from City Bureau to develop its documenter scheme:

Local citizens can become a ‘documenter’ by signing up for an account, which profiles what local issues they are interested in covering and gauges their current ability in reporting.
'Documenters' can then use the new City Scraper-powered website to toggle through upcoming events, filter by topic and area, currently extended into Chicago and Detroit.

This is a more interesting variation on the idea of "citizen journalism" than I've seen in a while. Bringing in more people to document events rather than report them starts to build out a new set of roles and responsibilities for both the professional journalist and the amateur contributor in an interesting way.

There are surely more interesting things to be done in the "always on, always publishing" age to work with others than just aggregating their tweets into articles. This seems like a move in the right direction - especially as its documenters are paid.