With "citizen journalism" heading to TV, with applications like CNN's iReport, is there still a need for high quality video content?

There is always a demand for high quality video, both content and technologically speaking. If the event or circumstance of the content is remarkable and of wide interest, the technical quality can almost become secondary. Reality TV actually becomes more compelling if the technical video quality looks almost amateurish.

Citizen eyewitness journalism integrated into the broadcast media has been around at least as long as the first camcorders, so I see iReport and other contemporary news video apps as simply continuing to feed the TV, not threatening web video. Even if local TV stations and the networks could dominate the web-to-eyeballs connection of citizen journalists to an audience, a substantial number of independent journalists distrusting of the MSM would remain totally web-bound and a larger number of news consumer would reject MSM usurpation of the web.

Moreover I will like to say that, While viewers will accept lower quality images captured on cell phones or similar devices as the news happens, this is no different than viewer expectations of lower quality images from war zones or when man landed on the moon. In all of these cases, there are reasons that this "raw" footage lacks studio quality. In other instances, where the nature of the footage would allow for a higher quality production, viewers will expect high-quality video. This is particularly true in an era of high-definition video and a trend to maximize the quality of images. When we offer viewers a product below their expectations, we disappoint our audience and send them to the competition.