For those of you who don’t watch CNN or visit CNN.com with any frequency, iReport is the news service’s attempt to create its own user-generated news hub. It’s supposed be to be able attract eyeballs on its own and in some cases, feed the Web site and the cable channel with free content donated by viewers.

To date, iReport is best known as the place where someone posted a bogus item about Apple (AAPL) CEO  Steve Jobs. But CNN says it has been using the site heavily to augment its Iran coverage. From a press release it sent out earlier this week: “Since last week, we’ve received 4555 iReport submissions related to Iran–including more than 1600 this past Saturday and Sunday alone, and an additional 689 just yesterday. To date, 150 of the Iran-related iReports have been vetted and verified by CNN producers for use on CNN air or online–something the likes of YouTube or Flickr just aren’t equipped to do given their lack of newsgathering infrastructure.” (Yesterday CNN told me it added another 399 Iran-related iReports, and that seven had made it onto air. Presumably those numbers are still increasing.)

The breast-beating seems a bit much given that CNN, like every other cable network, has been happy to play up any bit of social media it uses in its Iran reporting. But the point about the vetting and verification is interesting.

I checked with CNN rep Jennifer Martin, who spelled out what that means: That CNN producers have contacted the people who sent in all of the Iran-related iReports it has featured on the network and at least verified that they are who they say they are. That in itself seems worthwhile, and maybe even worth bragging about.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV has more, including an interview with CNN.com producer Lila King.

Here’s an example of some the “verified” footage the network has used so far. For some reason the play/pause/etc. controls don’t show up on these embedded videos, but I’ve been able to get them to start and stop by clicking on the image:

Iranians shouting “Allah O Akbar” at night:

A pro-Mousavi rally:

But this morning I got a missive from an employee at one of the cable news networks, who tells me I’ve got it all wrong. Speed is nice, but these days, there are other considerations that are much more important for media companies:

It’s not the speed of Twitter photo that’s remarkable. It’s that it’s FREE. In the past, we would have got that pic from one of the agencies. We didn’t need anything from the agencies yesterday. Anything we couldn’t get from our own crews, people sent us FOR FREE.”

See? Who says old media have been slow to adapt to the Web?

There are some Webby start-ups premised on this idea, too. NowPublic, notably, is trying to organize amateur reporters and photographers into something resembling a newswire, or at least an interesting site. But those guys still have to figure out how turn that into a business.

But the big guys already have a business. It’s a pretty good one, too: Selling TV airtime to advertisers for a lot more money than the Web guys will ever hope to get. And if they can squeeze a few more dollars out of free Internet content, via outlets like Twitter and Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN iReport site, so much the better.