Crowdsourcing and flexible lines

The idea is this: call on your readers to give you the stories, to look at your FOI documents, to find the things that are within their expertise so you can use your expertise and find the story.

Is it a good thing? Are putting ourselves in line to rely too much on the audience?

Worse, are we giving up our position as the agenda setters?

But still, we choose which stories to highlight, and in many ways this is an invaluable resource for getting stories the public wants but that journalists would rarely be able to search out.

The problems here though just reinforce the multitude of decisions that have to be made by newspapers and journalists on the web daily. Where are those lines - and as they become more "flexible," are the flexible enough not to break under pressure.

I don't know, and I doubt I ever will. However in this case, I think crowdsourcing is a good thing - as long as it's crowdsourcing and not crowdreporting or crowds as the newspaper