YouTube may already be packed to the gills with user-generated content, but it's looking for even more submissions, although with a more serious angle. In a post on the YouTube blog, the video portal announced the new Citizen News channel and called on all citizen journalists to submit their stories.

"No longer do you have to be a seasoned journalist or a paid commentator to make waves in the news. Everyday citizens are serving as reporters, covering news stories from every angle," news manager Olivia M. said in a video posted on the blog. "We believe that you YouTubers out there are changing the world of journalism."

Citizen News will serve as a hub for newscasts created by folks who never went to journalism school, offering coverage of election results, campus news and local issues the mainstream media missed.

YouTube is hardly the first website to foray into user-generated news content. Two years ago, CNN launched iReport, a service that lets users submit their own news items, which sometimes make their way onto CNN broadcasts.