Your criticism is certainly correct. I see more articles that seem to be light edits of someone else's PR releases. He's also guilty of a strawman argument. In

Your criticism is certainly correct. I see more articles that seem to be light edits of someone else's PR releases. He's also guilty of a strawman argument. In picking CNN's iReports (whatever that is), and then dismissing it, he ignores the vast, vast majority of "citizen journalism". But that's not even a proper example of the phenomenon: it's still speaking through CNN's mouthpiece. And that reveals one of the critical elements of citizen journalism, and one the OP ignores: that it's not subject to the editorial biases of established media. Nobody will say "that's irrelevant", or "we can't print that criticism of our advertiser".