The current state of news falls into one of two categories: dwindling paper based media or special interest group (often political) driven media sites.
When breaking news occurs worldwide we are getting used to relying on “on-the-ground” social media feeds from people on the scene to inform us of what is going on.
I believe a successful future news platform will be a convergence of social media with online news reporting. In such an environment professional news reporters would provide articles for the site. People on site on the ground would tweet, Facebook, or using other techniques provide real-time and real-life updates, photos and video. Readers would have the option of rating up or down on-the-ground inputs to the article as well as rating up or down the article itself. The result would be important and valuable articles rising to the top, but also, a community validation of external collateral provided real-time for the article. This latter mechanism would self-regulate against people who would try and put misinformation to the article. The expected increased volume of actual footage along with high negative ratings would send the misinformation to the bottom of the list.
How is this different from what is available now? Many sites provide news articles and then a public forum for people to write their opinions. These opinions are thumbed up and down by others. In this current model the forum is just a collection of opinions. In many cases the opinions are political leanings and the ratings are a measure of the audiences political affiliation. In the idea above, these opinion editions may also be provided but in a separate location. The primary differentiation is that the public news forum area is for texts, videos, and audio from people at the scene. This additional content is additional to the news from local participants. It is not opinion from readers. Thus the rating has no room for political opinions — only the validation of value by the reading public.
The Yahoo! Contributor Network is a start on the road to the above “connected news platform”. In this case the list of potential news reporters has increased. It is the presentation of the public mechanism to add to these articles and for the public to rate these additions that will determine if this model approaches the “connected news platform”. Also, as a start, the contributor network could be used by people adding color to articles by posting their local pictures, text and video feeds. The actual amalgamation of the content to the idea provided above can occur in the future.