Improving the truthfulness and accuracy of citizen reporting is the new initiative being floated by San Francisco-based startup, AllVoices. With the debut of a new credibility algorithm and payment plan for bloggers. The new system will pay anywhere from 25 cents to $2 for every thousand page views.

AllVoices is clocking some impressive stats, with 33,000 landing pages for countries, cities and special topics being covered by a legion of bloggers, who were previously reporting unpaid, according to News.com.au.

AllVoices.com was originally launched in response to the massive earthquake that rocked Pakistan in 2005, but in recent years it has become a global citizen-reporting site mentioned in the same breath as Global Voices and Associated Content. However, the same story from News.com.au, underscored the difficulty of relying on an algorithm and readers to rank the credibility of bloggers.

Contributors are free to post almost anything and their credibility is rated by readers and an in-house algorithm which measures postings against traditional media and other sources.

But throwing the site open to the public has its pitfalls.

One recent post with a high credibility rating said the Ark of The Covenant was about to be unveiled. Other stories cite no sources at all.

Futurist and entrepreneur, Ross Dawson, posted a comprehensive account on the new platform to his blog yesterday.

The News.com.au story points out that AllVoices and similar sites can fill in gaps created by correspondent positions being slashed, but they cannot immediately replace a knowledgeable editor. Journalism is more than reporting and writing and an editors job is to do more than simply spell check.

My two cents is that people should be paid to verify important stories with the aid of technologies like those being used on AllVoices.

I’m encouraged to see more technologies coming to the aid of the embattled profession of journalism, especially when it means that more voices will be heard in more places. I do, however, think that a story about the Ark of the Covenant gaining traction could easily have been a joke that people ran with. Cute though it may be, it’s not the type of thing would slip by someone whose job it is to ensure the accuracy of a publication and the reputation upon which it rests.

More information and more dialog is great, but eventually we’ll reach the point where we need someone to filter everything that is out there and as bMunch pointed out, “they could be called journalists!”

Thanks to Niko for the tip.