Thanks to Hilary for the link to a brilliant post by Kyle MacRae, Unedited. Unfiltered. Untrue, which brilliantly skewers CNN's new iReport site. If you haven't seen iReport yet, here's what CNN had to say about it:

Welcome to a brand new beta site for uncensored, user-powered news. CNN built the tools, you take it from there. All the stories here are user-generated and instant: CNN does not vet or verify their authenticity or accuracy before they post. The ones with the "On CNN" stamp have been vetted and used in CNN news coverage.

Anyone who knows anything about online communities and their intersection with online media should have all their lights flashing now, and Kyle obviously did. He uploaded a spurious picture, claimed it represented a fire in Scotland, and then sat back. He even managed to get the post on the front page of iReport by opening multiple tabs in Firefox and getting them to autorefresh. A citjournalism site that allows stuff like that is like a newspaper site that allows anyone on its editorial team to edit the front page. Stupid stupid stupid.

Read the whole post, and then wonder on the thing that got to me about it: the pompous prognostications of Mashable, who declared:

Ultimately, I’d say that CNN “gets it” with the iReport site. In addition to clearly understanding how to organize user-generated content, they are taking a fairly hands-off approach by not screening or censoring content, and not requiring registration to navigate around the site. Plus, with the bonus of being so closely tied to CNN, it should serve as a “minor leagues” of sorts for those that aspire to work in broadcast journalism, since citizen reporters will have an opportunity to become “stars” on the site and have their work aired on the cable network.

This points to a whole category problem with online journalism: people with no understanding of it, and with no understanding of how useable media comes about and comes to be trusted, can airily and condescendingly claim a company "gets it" just because they've put some UGC tools together, refused to moderate and generally just been super-cool and laid-back about the whole thing. Media cannot and will never be created on that basis. You need an editor. Otherwise it's just a message board with pretty pictures and a cool toolbar.