Last week a friend in the business informed me that a reporter at the news station she works at was using stories written by your fellow citizen journalists as "research" for the story she was putting together.

The story the reporter was working on was about the Lopez-Hill house. We received a couple of great stories from the Kern County Superintendent of Schools — which oversees the Kern County Museum and Pioneer Village where they are trying to relocate the Lopez-Hill House — and from Glenda Rankin and Dianne Sharman — daughters of Lavern Hill, the home's last resident.

Glenda and Dianne had both done extensive research on the history of the home and basically knew this story forwards and backwards. 

I saw the reporter's story. It didn't have the depth that the story we got did, in my opinion anyway.

It got me thinking, why should we need a reporter to tell this story when the people who actually go through the story can tell it even better?

Yesterday I was watching the Ken Burns film, Civil War, on PBS. It was a rebroadcast of the original series and they had special insights from Ken between each episode. During one of his commentaries he said something to the effect of, "I wanted to use these photographs and journal entries to tell the story. They breathe life into this war in a way that dates and statistics cannot."

That's how I feel about citizen journalism too. So often when a regular reporter does a story they spend so much time paraphrasing and there is only so much space and important things that people have to say get left out.

When you tell the story yourself that doesn't happen.