In recent weeks, the fallout from the elections in Iran has demonstrated to the world that ‘everyday people’ can have a perfectly legitimate hand in reporting the news.

With resources such as CNN’s iReport, Twitter, Facebook and everyday uploads to YouTube, the net is rife with places for citizens to make themselves heard.

Now YouTube is letting this go a step further, unveiling its Reporters’ Center, a resource designed to teach citizen journalists all about news reporting. Thus far, tutorial videos have described a number of tactics that run the gamut of journalism, from fact-checking to conducting a proper interview to proposing news pieces to covering global crises. The idea is to create a more advanced corps of citizens, ready to report at any moment.

Boasting big-name contributors such as CBS’s Katie Couric, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof and the Huffington Post’s owner Arianna Huffington, the site has surged into the public eye, just as Google (YouTube’s owner) seemed to wish.

On Google’s official blog, the company proclaimed, “We believe the power of this new media landscape lies in the collaborative possibilities of amateurs and professionals working together.” Following that mantra, Google recruited the aforementioned experts to show off some of the tricks to their respective trade.

PC World, introducing the site, seemed very optimistic in describing the Reporters’ Center as a beam of light in a dark time for journalism. “Bolstering the abilities of citizen journalism could revolutionize the industry, creating a broader community of skilled reporters capable of as-it-happens documentation of world news,” the blog post reads, continuing on to describe the site as a potential replacement for rapidly disappearing newspapers.

But the excitement over the Reporters’ Center has not consumed everyone in the line of work.

Chris Ariens, the Editorial Director for Content on mediabistro.com, said he thinks the site is an interesting concept, but not a game-changer. “I don’t think it can hurt,” he added.

“It’s sort of an add-on. It won’t change the ways colleges … or organizations teach journalism. It’s supplemental,” he explained, adding that he thinks the site will be used mostly by college students and “career-changers.”

Ariens, who is also the editor of Media Bistro’s TVNewser.com, said that the site would not change the industry for those already in the business. “I’m sure anybody who works at a news organization will look at it,” he said. “But they have their own means to train and retrain their employees.”

Still, he said the site might be helpful for the journalists giving advice on the site. Even though the videos are quite simple, he explained, they might serve as introductions between the reporter and a younger audience they might not already reach. He used Couric, whose CBS Evening News tends to be watched by an older set of viewers, as an example.

But for all the optimism and pleasant sentiments, it seems that many observers are watching the site’s development warily.

In the same blog post as mentioned before, PC World cautioned that Google is “giving traditional print journalism a run for its money,” and that in tandem with its Google News feature, the company may be contributing to conventional journalism’s ultimate death. “More independent reporters will have better skills for, well, honing in on other people’s jobs,” the post reads.

Ariens was less pessimistic, but he downplayed the overall effect the site would have. “It will be interesting to see if this actually takes off, and how many reporters will join in because they want to get their names out there, [but] if someone wants to get a job at CNN, I don’t think they’ll be able to say, ‘I went to YouTube’s Reporters’ Center.’”

Popularity: 1% [?]