Acknowledging that “citizen journalism has forced news organizations to change the way they do business,” news site OnMilwaukee.com announced last month it would invite readers to launch their own blogs on all things Milwaukeean.

So how are they faring? Ironically, publisher Andy Tarnoff predicted the news site’s biggest problem in his inaugural article: “There’s only one problem: with millions of random blogs floating around out there, how do you fight through the clutter?”

Despite its forward-thinking aims, OnMilwaukee.com has yet to solve the problem.

Blogs are cordoned off in the Reader Blogs section, not and integrated into the site by topic, and the quality varies greatly. Organized chronologically, mostly untouched by editing, nothing separates the wheat from the chaff, and mucking through the blogs can get tiresome.

Typical entries sound something like this:

‘Can you believe all the snow we have already Yuck….. we got way to much to soon.’

OnMilwaukee’s dilemma highlights the next challenge in open content: Plucking useful, relevant information from the user-generated pile to showcase on a bright spotlight — in this case next to the work of profesional journalists.

So how does a blog become journalism? By getting organized.

The most innovative web tools visually organize content so that users can make sense of the Internet. Google and Digg create hierarchies that list value in descending order, and Technorati has learned from Google’s algorithm to tell users which blogs have the most links—and thus authority. Some citizen journalism sites are starting to do the same. Newsvine ranks content from users and traditional media sources by reader votes, and GroundReport’s headline order is based on ratings of its exclusively user-generated content.

OnMilwaukee may not be there yet, but it’s headed in the right direction. When all the components are in place—not just the content, but also effective navigation—there could be something worth celebrating.

Rachel Sterne is Founder of GroundReport, an open news site that shares advertising revenues with writers.

This post has been updated