CNN tried to cut down on costs by recruiting a lot of "non-traditional" and "all-platform" reporters, while spinning it as this sort of citizen journalist thing. In actuality, it was really just a desperate attempt to get bloggers writing for them for free without giving college credit. Fair enough: There is nothing wrong with being creative in these harsh economic times. (Gawker's Nick Denton calls it "assuming that the economy is so volatile that most of you would like a little bit more predictability about your own income." Cute, right?)

But problems arise when you stop fact-checking these non-journalists' work, and a story is reported true without any sourcing. Especially if the story involves Steve Jobs having a fake heart attack and ends up causing a massive crash of Apple's stock:

And that's the second problem with these embedded blogger types that's cropped up recently. Last month, a NYU professor banned blogging about her class when one of her students got caught writing about the shortcomings of the school's journalism program for PBS's MediaShift.

As excited as networks and corporations are to jump into this whole Web 2.0 thing, it's worth remembers bloggers and anonymous denizens of the Internet are not unbiased. Nor trained in j-school journalism.

While intelligent discussion and debate is a strong suit for most of these citizen journalists, objective reporting is not.

And CNN could find itself in big trouble with Apple for this fraudulent blunder, especially since the news got to the stock market — see photo, right — and caused a giant dip before returning after the heart attack story proved false. Tomorrow, they'll report all iPhones self-destruct.