Back when I called a tiny newsroom in Oklahoma home, we filled our community pages with letters from rural correspondents. Most of the time we’d get handwritten letters going on about the weather and spaghetti dinners at the fire hall. It truly was mind-numbing stuff, then one day a letter came across my desk describing a shootout between feuding in-laws on a local ranch. Nobody had been killed, but after doing some digging, I found that one person had been injured and more than 30 rounds had been fired between four people. Journalists work hard to find stories, but sometimes you’ve got to rely on community members to steer you in the right direction. Sometimes it’s old ladies writing letters, others readers, listeners and viewers (depending on which type of media you are in) uploading videos, writing blogs, making comments and sending tweets. Citizen journalism can be a useful tool, but it can cross into the realm of irresponsible muckraking quickly, as we’ve seen recently with so-called “citizen journalists” posing as a pimp and a prostitute and going into ACORN offices asking all kinds of ridiculous questions. Did the people on the video cross the line? Absolutely, but you can’t tell me that ...