First, you'll never actually catch me use the word "crowdsource" in public, but people keep calling it that so ... :-).
Slashdot has done this sort of thing for years: Announce they're interviewing somebody and solicit questions. Then ask (or submit to) that person the questions that got the most votes. No reason it couldn't work on the non-geeky beat - it'd be a way to involve readers and might lead to questions you might not think of.
I'm in the middle of doing something like that with Drupal and the local district attorney: I started a discussion on questions you'd ask him if you were sitting across the table from him. Then posted a poll to select the top five questions. The DA has the questions and will submit his answers on Monday, which'll then go into a forum (well, a Drupal story) that he's agreed to jump into to answer any followups.
All worked well except for the advance-polling module (I tried that because it allows multiple votes; people were allowed to choose their top five questions), first because of a bug in its permissions (turns out if you set a filter to something most people can't access, in my case, a filter I use to embed photos, only the super-user can see the questions), then because it seemed to only let 10 or 11 people actually vote (possibly another permissions issue?). So I switched to a third-party polling service (www.polldaddy.com)