I feel like I have learned -- the hard way -- some truths about grassroots content and online community. We struggled with getting enough traffic from our initial model to attract advertisers, then veered off to another business model in hopes of saving the business. When that too grew very slowly, we had no choice but to shut down.

Our sites (we built 5 of them, but had planned many more) were primarily powered by content and conversation from our users. Each site had a leader or editor -- we called the position "enthusiast-in-chief" -- who was there to blog, shoot or produce video, do podcasts, and interact directly with users by commenting on their content and answering their questions. The enthusiast-in-chief provided the "professional" content meant to attract visitors, but the majority of a site's content -- blogs, photos, videos, maps, forum discussions -- came from users.

We gave users lots of incentives to post content and participate, with regular and ad hoc contests rewarding the best content with prizes from participating sponsors. There was a user points system, but rewards for gaining lots of points were purely psychological; we were surprised to see users on some of our sites compete with each other to move up the points ladder. (If you're interested in tips on how to increase user participation, I wrote a white paper on the topic earlier this year. The PDF version is here.)

Because our users were passionate about the topic of the websites, we thought going in that the content posted by users would be good enough to keep people's attention, and keep them coming back. We did get some really fantastic posts from users. A lot, actually. Of course, we also got plenty of user content that was average, mediocre, and some outright awful.

We didn't put ourselves in the position of killing the awful content; we just let it run through our content river but didn't highlight it. When a really good photo or story or video came through from a user, we put it on our homepage -- our "front page" -- and perhaps highlighted it in our weekly e-newsletter.

What happened with us is that we did attract a core group of regulars. Folks who we categorized as "super-enthusiasts" did join in the spirit of our sites and participated frequently. While a few of those people stuck around, many more participated a little bit, then faded away. Our growth in traffic was slow and steady, but unremarkable, and not enough to sustain a business.

In hindsight, I think we tried to rely too heavily on user submitted content. Even though a lot of it was really great, the overall experience was weak when compared to, say, reading a climbing or a mountain biking magazine filled with quality professional content throughout.

We believed that having a core level of professional content –- from our site editors -– would be enough to attract a loyal following even if the user-submitted content wasn't enough on its own. But I think we didn't have nearly enough of that. If I had any money left to throw at the business, I'd hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content -- and I'd mix that in with the best user content.

I am not trying to diss citizen or grassroots content here. Actually, I think it's incredibly important. I think that any news publisher would be a fool to ignore it. (So, bravo for Scripps for its YourHub initiative.) I think there are opportunities with citizen content to make journalism better -- and there are probably ways to make money from it.

But my message is that you need to leverage citizen content appropriately.

Of all the big changes roiling the newspaper industry, the one that gets little attention is the decline of the city columnist — the old Mike Royko figure who commanded a big audience, shaped discussion of the city ("did you read Royko today?"), and out-hustled the rest of the newsroom.

Today, many of the best writers go off to books or magazines, or write long features for their papers. The best reporters often wind up on investigative teams, appearing every six months with a supersized Pulitzer submission.

For those still doing the job of column-writing, two other changes have diminished their place in the civic landscape. Newspapers run more columns to expand the number of voices; a good idea, but it also dilutes the audience for any one writer. The audience is further diluted by rising competition from bloggers, who are often quick or good, sometimes both. And second, the whole notion of the "city" has been broadened to include the suburbs, whose residents may not care about doings in the central town. So the one safe topic to draw readers is traffic congestion.

In Seattle, the most consistently good metro columnist is Danny Westneat, a reporter who worked his way up from covering the suburbs, did a stint in Washington, D.C., and also covered the environment. Westneat is not a flashy or elegant writer. His prose is direct, simple, spare.

I wouldn't call Westneat the city's best newspaper writer. That would be the Post-Intelligencer's Art Thiel, who is unequaled in his ability to write fast, well, and funny.

Westneat has many of the necessary skills for the metro columnist, which are:

• Have something to say. This sounds rudimentary, but there are many opinion writers who assemble facts that lack a point. Call that "analysis," and yes, time will tell, government must look seriously at this issue, blah, blah, etc., etc., but don't call it a readable column.

• Show courage. It's easy to criticize a politician. It takes real guts to call b.s. on conventional wisdom. Westneat does that.

• Have a brain. The best columnists see things the rest of us miss. Or ask questions that cut to the issue.

• Get out of the office. It's amazing how few columnists actually leave the newsroom. Westneat recently traveled to Portland to ride that city's rail system.

• Have a voice that wears well. Scolds get tiresome. (I know, I've failed that standard.)

• Show range. The worst columnists get stuck on a few subjects. Tom Wolfe once warned columnists never to quote their kids or their spouses. A good columnist can move from cops to sports to the arts, from Roxbury to Northgate, and make them all interesting to a broad audience. From that we get a true sense of place.

• Do it in 750 words or less. Not all good writers succeed in both the short and long form. One successful example is Terry McDermott, who wrote a fine column for The Seattle Times before moving to Los Angeles.

Westneat has his critics, and that points to another essential. You must write in a style that gets noticed and discussed. Thick, ponderous prose won't do. If you're not being read, you're irrelevant. No matter how busy I get, I read Westneat.

Citizen journalism is being hindered and may even be dying at the hands of citizens themselves, a growing number of media experts believe. The fad journalism model is being brought down by poorly written and poorly presented content that is greatly inferior to content produced by experts, they say. To put it bluntly, if you need information on a subject, would you rather rely on the edited and proofread opinion of an expert, or the misspelled musings from some guy sitting in his basement?

Steve Outing, a self-described online media pioneer, journalist/columnist and citizen media entrepreneur, came to the conclusion that relying mainly on user-submitted content is a mistake, which he wrote about in his Editor & Publisher column Monday.

Hyperlocal site Backfence.com folded this summer due to “private business matters” the site's founders are not discussing. But its co-founder, Mark Potts, has stated he disagrees with Boriss's assessment that citizen journalism is on its way out, and he believes a business model similar to Backfence could succeed in the future.

“The magic of hyperlocal sites, be they Backfence, other startups, Yahoo Groups or local blogs, is that they provide a forum for community members to share and discuss what's going on around town. The back-and-forth of a good online conversation can be as rich, deep and interesting – or more so – than traditional journalism. In fact, the role of journalists in this process is overrated – except maybe by journalists! The less involved site managers are, aside from lightly moderating the conversation, the better,” Potts wrote in his own blog after Backfence closed.

“Hyperlocal content is really mundane. We heard this criticism all the time. You bet it is – if you're an outsider looking in,” he stated. “To members of the community who actually live with these local issues, it's vitally important. It's precisely that mundane content, and the conversations around it, that brings life to hyperlocal sites.”

The early returns are in, and it appears that Citizen Journalism, in which readers are enlisted to help create news that is more local and in-depth, will not be a real movement after all. There had been hope that Citizen Journalism might be a savior of Old Media — a way to integrate the benefits of new technologies, co-opt pesky bloggers, keep professional journalists in charge of our news, and keep “citizens” in their place as those who take direction from journalists.

The first ominous sign was the folding of hyperlocal site Backfence.com, which apparently provided insufficient financial and/or psychic incentives to motivate a sufficient number of sufficiently talented users to participate.

The problem with Citizen Journalism is that it tries to force news back to what it was. Actually, worse than it was. It takes the same stale, one-size-fits-all, center-left, authoritative-tone news model that news consumers are rejecting, then adds large quantities of material from unpaid amateurs who have no particular expertise in reporting, editing, writing, or their topic.

It also unrealistically expects people who are not “losers” to do this work for free (a particularly odd expectation coming from your typical minimum-wage-supporting journalist). Citizen Journalism seems to serve the wishful-thinking needs of job-fearing journalists, but not the real needs of typical news consumers who would just as soon read quality material without being asked to help.

The model that will work — that will make news better, not worse — is one that combines the talents of topic experts throughout the web with those who have a knack for aggregating and editing their material to satisfy an audience. While Citizen Journalism has had no successes, this model has. Dan Rather was taken down by a typewriter font expert who knew a forgery when he saw it.

Editors like those at DailyKos.com know how to pick stories that energize their audiences. Citizens will be customers, reporters will be experts, and editing will be news outlets’ core competency. Expert Journalism is our future, not because it is good for journalists but because it is good for news consumers.

Q: Are we going to see changes to Wikipedia?

A: There are ongoing efforts to introduce WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editing, but it's a really tough problem. It's always been our intention that (the editing experience) is approachable, that anyone can do it. As we've added more features, it's a little more complicated for newcomers to edit. An editing experience that's much more like what people would be familiar with like Microsoft Word - we want to make that happen.

Q: Do you worry that the process will not be as democratic?

A: Some people are idiots and some aren't. You have to acknowledge that and empower the good people to control the quality. But we've always been very flat and open to participation and new people joining. We know the current system works, and we also know it has certain weakness and certain strengths. We want to address the weaknesses without killing the strengths.

Q: Do you plan on adding other Web 2.0 elements, such as ranking entries or users or offering user profiles?

A: Probably not. Metrics for rating users is not under consideration because we don't see anything useful there. If you imagine that you took a job someplace where you're required to wear a name badge, but on that badge it says how many people like you and don't like you, this is not a healthy social environment. (When) you have a point system ... people start to do whatever they can to increase the points they are getting, which may or may not be the right behaviors.

Q: Wikipedia started the wiki movement, which enables a community of users to create and edit Web sites. What do you think of your copycats?

A: I think it's kind of cool. I would like to see a lot more. I think we're still very much in the beginning of user-generated content. You can think of tons and tons examples of things that people could collaborate and build together. Some of that stuff is going to be very obscure, but just like in a bookstore ... books about birds (are not) No. 1 best-sellers. They're steady things. To me that's the kind of thing the amateur birding community could easily build together, a bird-watching guide, and keep it updated, modified and make it useful and more comprehensive. I don't think we've seen nearly all that we're going to see.

Q: Do you worry people will suddenly decide they don't want to contribute for free and demand to be paid?

A: We haven't seen anything remotely like that ... because it's fun. One of my rants is against the term "crowdsourcing," which I think is a vile, vile way of looking at that world. This idea that a good business model is to get the public to do your work for free - that's just crazy. It disrespects the people. It's like you're trying to trick them into doing work for free.

What you're really in the business of is providing a nice place for people to come and do what they want to do. We're going to use advertising to build this social place, and people will come only if we provide them with tools and the social environment they need to have fun. If the by-product of that is some amazing work, that's great, too.

A recent article on a service in London and several U.S. cities that allows you to locate nearby public toilets by texting "toilet" on your mobile phone got me to thinking about the practical applications of locative media.

For example, what about a mobile application that offers you the ability to know about the who lives in your neighborhood and what they do for a living. Maybe you need some work done around your yard or a recommendation for a good plumber. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to identify locals (and other people they know) when you are in a public place and could receive alerts on your mobile device about who has a a particular expertise or connection that fits your needs?

What about the ability to know what happens in a neighborhood community center, library, or social service center as you walk by that location? Maybe there is an event or project that is aligned with your interests, or a volunteer opportunity you can inquire about on the spot - now that you can enable opt-in mobile alerts and stay better informed about happenings in your immediate surroundings.

How about knowing who in your neighborhood is a doctor or nurse, or where to go for help during a natural disaster when the Internet is down, phone lines, etc. are not working? A simple text messaging platform could offer such mobile services and direct you away from danger even when outside of your home.

There are many, many ways that mobile devices could (and should) be used to enhance our lives in practical ways. But the focus will likely remain on local business search and advertising for some time to come...because that's where the obvious money is.