Can anyone be a Journalist???

Well yesterday night while chatting on yahoo my friend Ron mentioned this term "open source journalism" or "citizen journalism". Being a grass roots programmer I immediately thought of "open source code" which is freely available on the web and is also freely accessible and modifiable by anyone. Well then I thought can "news" be the same way. Can any person write his or her own headline and story that will be published as news?? If so how do we know the authenticity of such broadcasts as not rogue stories written by a few to "hit the frontpages". Jeez... ironically will that statement never be used in the future because if this form of journalism gets popular then it may be quits for the newspaper industry. Beleive it or not but president candidate Al Gore has been propagating this concept and it has been tried out in websites like

www.darknet.com (A blog which is now a open source news maker)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page (Blog like newspaper)
http://www.wired.com/

Several new webpages are coming up on a daily basis experimenting this new concept. The concept is gaining a lot of thrust from google as it is similar to blogging and would serve google a lot of bounty if this mode of news casting was accepted world wide. The war between microsoft and google, although fascinating, seems to decide the fate of the world wide web.