Bloggers and Podcasters as Stringers

Stringer a freelance journalist, who is paid for each piece of published or broadcast work, rather than receiving a regular salary. (From the Wikipedia entry for stringer)
I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of bloggers and others as news sources. There was a time when newspapers and radio networks had stringers all over the world feeding them stories. This was how we knew what was going on and it worked well. Stringers were good reporters and they knew the areas that they were in. But that doesn’t work as well as it used to, because it’s expensive to fly people around the world and get them to where the stories are.
So I was thinking the other day, what if we used bloggers and podcasters from around the world as stringers. The benefit here is that there are already folks producing news worthy content just about everywhere in the world. People are reading blogs about the war in Iraq, written by people there everyday. Then the tsunami hit it was bloggers that got more news out faster than any of the major news sources. All that needs to happen is that we need to collect, organize and sort the incoming information so folks can find what they are looking for.