Sunday. Thirty hours to deadline. Rain.

Monday. Afternoon. Wes Phillips, 22, owner of a small production company nobody's ever heard of, is shooting a commercial in suburban North Carolina. He leads his four-person team through a final shot, rushes home to edit and uploads the video hours before a midnight deadline.

To call Phillips an amateur isn't quite adequate. He's been working with video since he was a kid. But his $12.72 budget, among other things, makes it clear he also isn't quite a professional.

It's Dec. 4, 2006. Five Point Productions, Phillips' company, just produced an ad for Doritos. Near the end of January, users of the Doritos Web site will pick the ad as the winner of the chip company's "Crash the Super Bowl" contest, a designation that will launch the 30-second piece into one of television's most expensive ad slots of the year, and win its producers $10,000 and a trip to the Super Bowl.

The ad, "Live the Flavor," is the latest example of a non-professional video making its way onto the national media landscape.

Jeremy Gilbert/The Poynter Institute

Some journalists might call this citizen advertising.

"Basically I look at it like 'American Idol' 's first season," Phillips says. "This is the 'American Idol' of advertising. And we're the first ones to win."

Like news organizations, advertisers have been asking people to send them content for decades. New York Times ad critic Stuart Elliott says contests like this one aren't entirely new. But, in certain critical ways, this one is different.

"The point of it," Elliott says, "was [to say] 'Hey look! We're on this user-generated content bandwagon. We're hip. We're with it. We might be a massive corporation, but we're down with what you young people are into."

Elliott says mainstream news organizations are saying the same thing to their readers, viewers and users: "Hey, we might be a 138-year-old newspaper, but we can dance the Macarena just like anybody else."

Newspapers these days seem to run contests to attract content from readers about as frequently as anyone dances the Macarena, but that hasn't stopped people from sending great stuff in, or posting it in places where the media can get at it for free.

The best picture of the London train bombings was snapped by a passenger. A horrifying video of a UCLA student being tasered repeatedly by police was made by a student. And video coverage of Saddam Hussein's execution came from someone with a camera phone.

What do these producers have in common? None of them were paid. One of them, the guy who allegedly made the Hussein video, may even have been jailed.

But for their Super Bowl commercial, the Doritos gang got ten grand. Sweet payout? Not so much, says Bob Garfield, ad critic for Advertising Age magazine and co-host of NPR's "On the Media."

"In effect, this commercial was free," he says. "Ten thousand dollars is what Frito-Lay could shake out of the sofa cushions."

Garfield says a professional Super Bowl ad can cost nearly a million dollars to produce. Phillips knows this. And yet, he doesn't feel he was ripped off.

"Money is good, and I wouldn't have been upset if they had paid us more," he says. "But you can’t buy this kind of exposure."

For lots of people, exposure is worth a lot. Think YouTube. People want to be seen, to be noticed. Recently, the mainstream media has started finding ways to tap this cultural hunger. "Here's a place to share yourself and your stories with the world," a news Web site might imply. But when specific, highly valuable content appears -- the Hussein footage, for instance -- the subtext becomes clear. "We want your content. Really, we want it bad. And we want it for free."

MSNBC has "Be a Citizen Journalist," a place where viewers can upload video stories. The site makes it clear that payment will not be offered. CNN's "I-Report" is similar. See also "You Witness News," a joint project by Yahoo and Reuters that allows non-professionals to submit images to the wire. It pays, but not a lot, and only when an image is picked up by a Reuters wire member for print.

These efforts appear to be steps in the right direction. They expand the news, involve regular folks in its production and spark conversation. Not everyone is out to make a buck; some are just happy to see their work on television or online.

While some people call this democracy, others call it a rip-off.

Center for Citizen Media director Dan Gillmor stands among the latter.

"A business model that says: 'You do all the work, we'll take all the money. Thank you very much.' -- is not only unfair, I think it's unsustainable," he says.

Gillmor is confident that "a robust free market" will arise. He's picturing a place where people will have a shot at selling their images and video to the highest bidder. He's thinking of places like OhmyNews, Scoopt and Associated Content.

Some mainstream news organizations, including the BBC, have said they will pay for content they receive from viewers. But only if it's really great stuff. Really great.

For a long time, NPR has bought "audio postcards" from professional and amateur radio producers alike.

JPG magazine reverse publishes, and pays. It's a photo magazine that bases its print edition on submissions to its Web site. Readers vote online for the pictures they want to see in the magazine.

Still, at most news organizations, efforts to get people to contribute content take place on the periphery. They're a sideshow.

Few places regularly feature that content.

One place that does is Current TV, a small but growing national cable television network based in San Francisco.

New media strategy manager Robin Sloan says one thing really sets Current apart from its competitors.

"For us [at Current], [user generated content] is not just some marketing stunt, it's not a gimmicky thing," he says. "For us, it's right at the heart of what we're trying to do."

Current was launched late in the summer of 2005 by former Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt. The network accepts submissions of video stories to its Web site and allows viewers to pick the ones that should run on television. If a video gets "greenlighted," its producer gets paid.

The network relies on a flexible pay scale. Producers -- who, more often that not, are frequent viewers of the network -- negotiate for the best price. They are paid at least $500 for each three- to 10-minute story that gets picked for TV.

This isn't a contest, Sloan says. No matter how amateur the producer, the network treats him or her like a professional. And the relationships that develop are often lasting.

"The pay scale is sort of not the end of the story for us," Sloan says. "It's not a one-time thing. ... It feels like a stringer system, like at a news agency. You submit a piece, it gets a lot of votes, it goes on TV. And then suddenly you get commissioned by Current. ... You can even get hired."

But at Current, it's not all about the Benjamins. Sure, producers want -- and need -- money. But it isn't the endgame.

"People are complicated," Sloan says. "You can sort of get paid -- in quotes -- in different ways."

He's talking about exposure, recognition, fame -- that same magical stuff Doritos gave to Wes Phillips.

And here's an interesting twist: Those Doritos ads have some Current staffers kicking their desks. The network has been running user-generated advertisements since it launched a year and a half ago. But Sloan says he isn't letting the Doritos hype get to him.

"For Doritos," he says, "it's very much this stunty thing they do once. At Current, it was more a challenge of creating a system. ... We're trying to create a sustainable system."

Just like the people who produce news content, the ad producers negotiate for payment -- in cash and, of course, exposure.

What would Wes Phillips have demanded if he'd had the chance to negotiate payment for his Doritos ad? Would he have asked for more than $10,000? Less?

He says he isn't sure, but that he's happy about how things turned out.

"Basically," he says, "Doritos paid for our exposure."

Just the other day, the video hit a million views on YouTube. Phillips says the spot did better in USA Today's Super Bowl Ad Meter poll than any Frito-Lay advertisement in history. It's caused a buzz and no doubt launched Phillips' career.

Hard to put a price on that.