The site Gather has announced a contest for two $1000 scholarships to two full-time journalism students, one undergraduate student and one graduate student whose articles best represent citizen journalism.

This is the kind of thing there needs to be lots more of to establish a culture where people realize that they can do real reporting and distribute it on the Net.

Arianna Huffington, whose name will help distribute news of the contest, shall be the judge. I wonder what it is beyond her name though. While she is a leading pundit and the face of a massively popular news links/superblog site, I haven't seen much in the way of citizen journalism from her quarters.

I can think of three other online journalism figures who are better equiped to judge: Dan Gillmor, who wrote the book on Citizen Journalism -- "We the Media" -- or two of the real-time living pioneers of citizen journalism: John Byrne of Raw Story, or Josh Marshall of his TPM mini empire.

Gather is a site that plans to give its content providers revenue from advertsing on its pages -- an economic model, which I have to say, is a rather promising one. More detail: "It just seems fair that we share our advertising revenue with you based on the quality and popularity of the content you contribute on Gather. We will also share some of our revenue with you if you choose to use the site actively, exploring content that others write, searching on Gather and on the web, and inviting your friends, family, and colleagues to use the site. We will pay occasional users in points that you will be able to use to purchase goods and services from Gather partners in a few months. We will pay frequent users, who write great content consistently, in cash if they choose."

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