The print edition of the Daily News today kicked off a new feature, Education Revolution countdown blog. This is where you can go to be read online, and get a shot at being published in the print edition.

This is the kind of feature available on valleynews.com, the Daily News' citizen journalism project.

Readers are submitting stories, photos, event notices and are able to comment on other people's stories instantly onto the valleynews.com site.

Our site and others, which have been popping up regularly lately by news organizations around the country, are being touted as the best way to spread the word about what readers care about quicker and further than ever before. Newspaper bosses are reinventing the way they put out news and interact with their readers by using such new features.

Besides the fact that it's fun to come up with something new, news companies are realizing they don't have all the answers and need to connect with readers even better than they have in the past.

You've heard about YouTube.com, where you can upload videos. You know about MySpace.com, where you can create your own Web page. Blogs are popping up like mushrooms. Others have conversations in online bulletin boards.

There are projects in the works like Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero, in which hundreds of people across the globe volunteer to do interviews, research and write stories online, tapping into the expertise of many as opposed to just one reporter and editor - or small team - reporting on deadline.

Rosen is a New York University journalism professor and one of the country's biggest proponents of citizen journalism.

Another recent example of this new kind of journalism is taking shape in Lake Tahoe. The TahoeDailyTribune.com recently kicked off its version of this new form of reader/user participation in the newsgathering process. On top of the paper's environmental stories, readers can contribute facts, tips, and sources to the stories on "The TahoeNotebook."

Two journalism graduate students at the University of Nevada, Reno, created the Notebook when they found in a study that news was frequently only "framed as a conversation between elites and officials."

They created the Notebook as a middle-ground between Internet bulletin boards, that they say few journalists read, and citizen journalism, which many citizens with day jobs, don't have time to write. So, readers can shape the news with the idea that through teamwork, the reporter and his or her readers can create an even better news product than either can produce alone.

This is fascinating. In the old days, you sent in a letter to the editor. You can still do that, by the way. But your letter likely will get edited to only a single sentence or two, and then you may or may not see your words in print. With the Internet, everyone gets a chance to weigh in and hash out ideas in real time. What a concept.

So stop reading this now, register on valleynews.com and share your thoughts about this story or any other idea.

Feel free to e-mail me at jason.kandel@dailynews.com or call at (818) 713-3635.