Digging the Toyota mess through crowdsourcing

Digg will host a crowdsourced interview today with Jim Lentz, president and CEO of Toyota Motor Sales USA.

Toyota bigwig Jim Lentz will answer questions from the Digg community at 2 p.m. Pacific time todayThis is part of a regular Digg Dialogg series so the concept isn't new. But it's been awhile since the interviewee has been someone currently sitting in a boiling pot of water (I think you have to go back to this Timothy Geithner interview).

What's great about the Dialogg concept isn't just that the crowd is asking the questions but that the questions are 1) made public beforehand and 2) the Digg community votes on which ones get asked. Some of the questions are better than others, but there's some detail to some that wouldn't normally surface in a typical media interview.

I can't tell whether a professional/traditional journalist will be asking the questions, as is sometimes the case, but in these types of hot-button interviews on extremely important issues, I think it's an advantage. It's one thing to have the crowd submit questions, which builds depth and diversity, but a professional interviewer will be more skilled at calling B.S. on some answers and also asked pointed questions of his/her own.

Either way, it's an example of the continued evolution in media where the crowd gets more control for the benefit of all.