According to Dan Gillmor, the Wikipedia community is debating if they want to create Wikinews, the ultimate in participatory journalism. This is just the community to do it, not just because they have the numbers and that it will be different from existing media -- but they have to.
In the News articles on Wikipedia already provide alternative group coverage. The problem is that with big events, they need to fork reference articles from news articles. The Wikinews page acknowledges this:
Wikinews articles provide very detailed information about specific events...Wikipedia articles provide condensed information about a series of events
What's interesting is how they want to extend wiki coverage to include original reporting by citizen journalists, going beyond citing external sources. What's different is unlike how blogging's individual voice leads to genre remediation closer to opinion columns, the group voice of wiki may lead participants to strive for genres higher with more robust journalism practices. This is why they are adding a review and fact-checking process before articles are published. You can see and contribute to articles under development, but the very existence of this criteria, similar to what they are doing to create a print version of Wikipedia -- is a perfect meld of top-down and bottom-up practices.
