I’ve come across plenty of cries about how journalism schools need to re-think what they teach in order to better incorporate new media skills.

The one that hit it home for me was reading advice from Rob Curley posted at the College Media Innovation blog. “Skillset is important. But mindset is most important.”

Or as I like to explain it: Cost of an HTML tutorial at Media Bistro: $19.95. Buying Adobe’s Creative Suite software package: $399. Understanding the power of connections through the Web: priceless.

Well how about harnessing the wisdom of the crowd through the Internet to help report out stories? It isn’t a traditional means of reporting, but it certainly is drawing on a new media mind set. And that’s just what two of my fellow students are doing at NYC24.org, the multi-media workshop at Columbia’s J-school.

On a public wiki they have written the skeleton of a story about bloggers being sued and hope to quickly create a community of interested bloggers, writers, whoever around that wiki to help them find out what’s happened in this arena.

“Here’s what WE know, but we’d like to know what YOU know. Please help us add to this story by contributing facts and experiences. You’re welcome to edit and make the story the best you think it can be.”

Using a wiki to report out a story isn’t a brand new experiment, but if J-schools need to re-think how to teach journalism, this is probably an experiment we will see more of in the future — how to create and guide a community to help with your reporting.

The final story will be edited, fact-checked, made libel free and posted on NYC24.org’s “risk issue.” The real “risk” will be taken by Lexi Matsui and Anna-Katarina Gravgaard, the student journalists who aren’t completely sure how this experiment will turn out.

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David Cohn is editor of NewAssignment.Net’s blolg. In full disclosure he is in the class where this experiment is taking place and wishes he thought of the idea.