The tide of participatory media may be starting to erode the beaches of conventional news reporting. Media critic and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has proposed NewAssignment.net, a Web-based non-profit to fund independent-minded reporters through private contributions from anyone interested in their investigations. The (paying) audience would suggest article ideas; professional journalists would go out and report them.

So far Rosen’s scheme is hypothetical, though it has already attracted a $10,000 pledge from Craig Newmark, creator of craigslist, the grass-roots mega-site of community listings and classified ads.

AskQuestions.org, launched by publishing consultant and PC Magazine co-founder Cheryl Woodard,  has been following a similar plan for quite a while. The site invites visitors to nominate and vote on questions, which journalists then investigate.

The Wisconsin State Journal’s “Reader’s Choice” poll asks its Web audience to decide which of five possible articles should appear on the front page of the following day’s print edition. And there are many more instances of Web publishers collaborating with “the people formerly known as the audience,” a group we’ll be referring to with the handy acronym TPFKATA. (Rosen has some interesting things to say about this group.)

If you publish anything on the Web, you need to explore this trend–which some call “open source publishing”–and find ways to use it to your advantage. We’ll keep pointing to notable examples as they surface.