The collective “You,” or perhaps I should say “We” is a serious nomination for Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year cover.

At a luncheon with panelists Brian Williams (NBC anchorman), Arianna Huffington and other media types, there was mixed feelings about giving “You” or rather “Us” an award.

“The impact of bloggers, Wikipedia and YouTube, where consumers increasingly disperse and devour unfiltered opinions on everything from lunch preferences to political issues, is harmful to American culture. ‘We’re choosing cat juggling videos over well-thought-out, well-researched and well-reported evening newscasts,’ said Williams. ‘Our celebration…and marketing of self, I believe, is tearing us apart and could kill us.’”

Back in 2003 Time Magazine gave the Person of the Year Award to the American soldier. If there ever was a year to give the award to Americans across-the-board, I imagine this is it – during the rise of social media.

Time probably won’t go that far. The list of nominations right now include Al Gore, George Bush and other usual suspects. Sticking out from the group – the only nomination that isn’t a proper name – the “YouTube Guys.”

And while the YouTube guys would get the cover picture, in obvious ways this would also be giving an award to the collective “You,” which has made YouTube a success.

The possibilities that “You” could win this award, defined as “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives…” is concerning for some in the media.

Take this scathing article from The Nation, “The Death of Newspapers.”

Well, there is always what they call citizen journalism. That means, if you see something, take a picture of it with your cellphone and call in. It’s not exactly New York Times reliability, but it’s open-source, and they tell us that is terrific stuff. You know about Wikipedia. So why not wiki-wacky news?

I have qualms with the direct analogy to Wikipedia — NewAssignment.Net is studying open source in all its manifestations. The most robust is open source software – and there are ways to parallel that in journalism.

But like it or not, the collective “Us” is having an impact on the media. Will “We” win the award for person of the year? Probably not, according to pundits.

But it’s not a bad idea to begin studying the way this new form of media works, like this class, taught by Trebor Shotlz of the Institute of Distributed Creativity.

Brushing this emerging form of participatory media aside as “wacky” is a disservice to journalism. Sharing networks already exist online and they are going to collaborate – why not build a way so they can work together to do journalism?

As the Nation article says “Thanks to the Internet, the iPod and so forth, we have more media outlets than ever before—but fewer reporters.” I wonder though – is it the Internet’s fault for not benig able to find a way to build reporters on the web – or is that something the journalism profession should take the lead on by building a pro-am network?