You’ve heard of Citizen Soldiers, and here’s your chance to be a Citizen Journalist… which is like a Citizen Soldier, with fewer guns, comfier bunks, and no sand in your butt-crack.

NASCAR is offering up access to its raceday inner workings to bloggers, online editors, and other people who cover NASCAR of their own volition.  This, of course, caught our interest, and we immediately began tabulating our possible windfall of free race tickets.  Not so fast, Brian France tells us in his press release: “The Citizen Journalists will be selected as part of a review process including: professionalism, reporting and commentary, use of social networking tools.”

Dang.

If only the criteria had read: “lack of professionalism, totally fabricated reporting and commentary, and use of Mike Helton’s moustache as a metaphor for Mike Helton – that’s called a synechdoche, folks!”

But our misfortune is your potential winning lottery ticket.  Since so many of the web’s Citizen Journalists blow through here on Friday afternoon, we sure wanted to help you get the chance to sniff Casey Mears’ firesuit or tackle a NASCAR official for your blog entry entitled “What Happens When You Tackle a NASCAR Official.”  Enquiring minds want to know.

In the meantime, NASCAR isn’t going to stop up with its dastardly plan.  We’ll be here reporting NASCAR news in the same reliable, timely, honest tradition of web journalism you’ve come to know and trust; we’ll be here making it up.

Read the Official Release from the desk of Brian France here:  http://www.nascar.com/2009/news/headlines/official/06/02/citizen.journalists/index.html