So rather having an immigrant lift your aging mother from a bed directly, you have a robotic arm controlled via computer by a someone in a far away land do it. Robots are not smart enough to do a lot tasks by themselves, but if they are remotely controlled by a human, they can do thousands of tasks, even delicate ones.

So now that brings us to our citizen journalists as robots controlled by professional journalists or better yet professional journalists controlled by citizens or the true panacea for higher quality journalism is to have it both ways.

Here is the experiment at work. Robert Scoble, whom the BBC calls the blogger and videoblogger extraordinaire, was at the World Economic Forum in Davos interviewing folks for his website, and BBC blogger Tim Weber watched as Scoble interviewed Marc Benioff, a Davos participant:

…not with a big video camera but a small Nokia mobile phone, that sent a live video stream of the interview to his website. So far, so ambitious. Now comes the stunner. While he was doing the interview, Robert saw live on his phone screen the comments and questions posted by his viewers.

Just to illustrate how it works: When Marc pulled me into the conversation, within half a minute Robert had live on his screen a reader’s query about the BBC’s video-on-demand policy. Robert asked me the question straight away, and as we continued talking about the mobile phone industry and video on the web, more BBC-related queries piled up.

Since a citizen journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the delicate task of doing a professional interview and since a professional journalist shouldn’t be expected to do the complicated task of getting citizens involved on the scene when he or she is out on a interview, we now can bring in help from afar via technology, just as we would if we were really talking about robots.

Now this is extremely big — a stunner really — because it can change the equation of how news is gathered and reported, especially for smaller scale equations like with my Representative Journalism idea where groups of a thousand or smaller can hire their own journalists.

Just as Scoble did, if I am a reporter, I would use Twitter to tell my audience that I am on my way to interview Mr. Big. In five minutes, I will be live streaming the interview back to my website or to your iPhone, please jump in with your questions.

Or if you are a citizen journalist reporting on Mr. Big, you Twitter whichever newsrooms might be interested in the interview. The professional editors log on to your livestream at your website or on their cell phones and can do two things: 1) quickly verify that you are in fact interviewing Mr. Big, and 2) can feed you questions.  The mainstream then has a verified, professionally enhanced interview that it can use in its stories. Even when things happen spontaneously.

The citizen journalist gets to do a fun, exciting or interesting interview, maybe with monetary compensation, without worrying about the more complicated stuff that is necessary to finish a full-blown story. The mainstream media expand their reporting resources.  

Of course, the real panacea is that pro and amateur journalists Twitter their editors and citizen bases at the same time. So during an interview  the reporter, the editors and the citizenery all are weighing into the interview. It is putting Jay Rosen’s Beatblogging into real time, any time. It is citizen, civic and public journalism Nirvana.

I will be moderating a panel on Friday afternoon Feb. 22 entitled Ubiquitous Journalism. What does that mean? As one of the journalists and not one of the computer folks, I am not 100 percent sure. But here is how it was described to me by Nicholas Diakopoulos, one of the conference organizers:

Ubiquitous Journalism is our invented term for how the data flowing from large networks of sensors and/or people can be applied to journalism. In the Ubiquitous Journalism Panel we’re exploring big news data flows, whether they’re coming from lots of digital sensors in confined geography, or from lots of human reporters globally. The discussion will point to how these streams and the systems that handle them lead to public knowledge and public impact.

Of course, journalists, at least this former one, might be a bit intimidated by that description, but that’s why we have to get together with the computational folks. I have some serious reading to get done before my moderation. Here is the whole panel:

• Jenny Preece, Dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, developing 911.gov, a prototype Community Response Grid
• Mark Hansen, Co-PI of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing , creator of sensorbase.org
• Amra Tareen, Founder and CEO, AllVoices.com
• Leah Culver,  Founder of Pownce, a San Francisco-based micro-blogging service

Here too is a new course Computation and Journalism at Ga. Tech being taught by the conference organizer Irfan Essa. I am having lunch with him next week and talking to this class about civic and citizen journalism 

Very cool stuff. I am excited by the possibilities.