Old Media is dead! Today CNN officially launched iReport, the first citizen media site other than Current, NowPublic, Newsvine, and other ones that don't matter. But CNN's making a good run for not mattering either. See, some reports on the site, which has the tagline "Unedited. Unfiltered. News," get edited and filtered and put on TV. What made the cut? Teenage book reports and disaster porn. I'd put an example below, but CNN failed to learn from the one thing YouTube does right and let people embed videos on other sites. A real shame, because they'll miss out on all this news:

This image was lost some time after publication.


The full headline is "BREAKING: Woodland creatures eat novice gardener's summer crop." Not actually from The Onion.


This story was actually just a link to another site. CNN is the new Netscape Propeller.


Finally, something newsy! For the CNN definition of news.

This post is not just a "Here's something you hadn't seen, but don't bother" — CNN had a chance to turn "citizen journalism" from local-news wankery into a well-funded section of the news industry. But instead it found a way to plug cheaper coverage into its 24-hour news hole at the expense of quality, filling the network with explosions and white whines that belong on YouTube. There is a right way to do this, isn't there?