How Effective is Crowdsourcing for Journalists?

Tim Barmann's visit to class today offered some insight on how new companies are using social media today to attain information.  He showed us how the ProJo uses Google Forms for crowdsourcing to ask people on Twitter, Facebook, etc. how much snowfall they've gotten in their area.  However, at this point, crowdsourcing can't be completely trusted as a source because, as Tim showed us, people will submit ridiculous numbers to the paper which negatively affect the interpretation of the results.  I did find his insight useful in some aspects, but it's hard to trust such a new way of attaining information; it'll be interesting to see where this method goes in the future for journalists.