By now, we should be used to relying on readers and viewers to provide coverage for us in times of natural disasters. Sure, we can drive the trucks to the point where a hurricane is forecast to make landfall, but forecasts aren’t always spot-on. And we get little warning for tornadoes, and none for earthquakes. (Twitter notwithstanding.) Professional journalists have relied upon eyewitness descriptions, photos and videos from people on the scene of calamities, since long before the Internet.

But if that’s all we’re using user-generated content for in our news reports, we’re leaving ourselves too vulnerable to authorities who wish to control our coverage. Organizers and supporters of the Occupy movement have recognized the importance of putting cameras in the hands of participants, to minimize the chance that a newsworthy moment happens without being recorded for the public at large.

That ought to become more journalists’ role, too – not just specifically for Occupy protests, but for all continuing coverage of daily life in our communities. I hope that reporters across the country take into their news meetings a copy of that NY Times blog post I linked earlier in this piece, and say to their colleagues, “we need to find ways to prevent this from happening in our community.”

One of the things the NYC police have been trying to do to keep a lid on the protests is corral and/or exclude journalists from certain areas — and in many cases even arrest them — and then argue that only “registered” journalists are allowed to move freely (in an Orwellian move, the New York police restricted them to what they called “Free Speech Zones”). As Elisabeth Spiers of the New York Observer noted, the rules that govern who can be considered an official journalist for police purposes are convoluted and in some cases even contradictory, since they require that someone report on events before applying for a permit— events that they should not have been reporting on without a permit.

Here’s why they’re so upset: This bill could inflict a ton of collateral damage, some of which could be a crucial blow to free speech on the web. The New America Foundation’s Rebecca MacKinnon summed up the objections to the bill well, arguing that it would handcuff tech startups, lead to political censorship, and have a chilling effect on speech on the web in general. As Dan Gillmor put it in the Guardian: “The longer-range damage is literally incalculable, because the legislation is aimed at preventing innovation – and speech – that the cartel can’t control. If this law had been passed years ago, YouTube could not exist today in anything remotely like the form it has taken.”

The First Amendment never belonged to a single industry or its employees anyway. It belongs to everyone. The freedom of the press is a public right (along with the freedom of speech and to peaceably assemble). So let’s encourage our fellow citizens to use their freedom of the press, even when authorities try to say professional journalists can’t.

Especially when authorities try to say we can’t.

What was once a “you can’t yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater” exception to First Amendment protections has mutated into “you can protest only in approved zones during approved hours of the day using approved personal belongings and stances.” Don’t link arms. Don’t lie down. Don’t stay overnight.

Rights are like muscles. Use ‘em or lose ‘em. The more citizens we bring into the process of reporting the news, the stronger our freedom of the press will become.

While the news availability may be spreading, there are still dire consequences for citizen journalists (and professional journalists) for writing negative posts about the wrong parties.

In March, Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad was arrested for criticizing the Egyptian military’s role in the revolution. He was sentenced to three years in prison for libel. Human Rights Watch called his arrest “the worst strike against free expression in Egypt” in more than three years.

On Monday, activist and blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah was arrested for speaking out against the military junta’s role in violence that erupted at an Oct. 9 Coptic Christian protest in Cairo.

Reporters cannot be everywhere and cannot know about all events taking place in their communities. In that sense, citizen journalism may help to broaden the
kind of events that are reported. Citizen journalists can be a help by posting interesting things they see throughout the day or direct hints on their blogs that lead professional journalist’s in the right direction to finding a story.

As long as citizen journalists are remaining a help and not a burden, they are a good addition to the news world.

Citizen journalists and professional journalists work together for one purpose—to inform. They’ve quickly formed a symbiotic relationship that, through a variety of different ways, brings the news to your fingertips.

According to the Knight Community News Network, which tracks citizen journalism outlets, there are more than 1,000 citizen and community media sites across North America. One of Holland’s nearest citizen news publications is the Grand Rapids-based Rapidian, established in 2009 as a project of the non-profit Grand Rapids Community Media Center. The Rapidian’s news is distributed through its main website and linked to from other avenues such as Twitter.

The Rapidian focuses on local news, but the citizen news concept is becoming essential during global crises. This past January, international news organizations raced to cover the Tunisian political protests. On Dec. 27, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself to protest the police confiscation of his fruit and vegetable cart. The ensuing protests led President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to step down and flee to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 14. The protests soon spread to Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and other countries including Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Major news organizations covered the event, but not all information came from corporate-owned media giants. Amira al-Hussaini, the regional editor covering the Middle East and North Africa for the online citizen news blog Global Voices, reported Tunisia’s protests before traditional print and broadcast news outlets did. With its motto, “The world is talking. Are you listening?” Global Voices’ Middle East coverage was discussed even by a New York Times story.

Levine revels in pointing out the hypocrisy of billion-dollar corporations like Google that advance their own economic interests by lobbying for an open Internet at the expense of the cultural creators that provide so much of the value in a broadband subscription. His gallery of cultural parasites also includes social networks like Facebook and YouTube, whose business models depend on publishing a steady supply of free content from wired, forward-thinking Netizens like you and me. But Levine points out that after nearly two decades of dreamy, collectivist rhetoric about cyberculture, crowdsourcing, citizen journalism and the like, professional media organizations still produce the bulk of compelling online content.

The Associated Press this morning reports an exclusive, explaining how the White House can receive real-time updates on a situation on the ground, leading up to a revolution, predicting crime and disorder, or the ‘mood in the air’ shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency on a daily basis, out of an “anonymous industrial park in Virginia”, follows over 5 million tweets by users on the ground.

The ‘Open Source Center’, manned by a team the agency affectionately dubs the “vengeful librarians”, also trawls other social networking sites like Facebook, along with Internet chat rooms; all the way down to newspapers and anything that anyone can contribute to openly.

Anonymous members are good at remaining anonymous. But even if the Zetas don’t find them, they could go after another group online, says Cave. “You have this underground social network-based citizen journalism movement that’s risen up to take the place of the intimidated press corps. So the fear is that those people who are less able to protect their anonymity — they’re going to be the ones who are vulnerable. They’re going to be all thrown in with Anonymous and the hackers. So that’s one of the real concerns is that the little bit of freedom of the press Mexico now has through blogs or social networks could be in danger because of this.”