That was the exact phrase that popped into my head after reading the subhead.
Now for one of those nutty, wild-assed guesses: what do you think about Anathem?
forfeits in geek card
My issue with Newsvine, and sites like Newser, Google news and all of the pure Digg-clones, etc is that they're run by hackers, not news people. And no matter what the founders say, they all have the same business model, to make money by commoditizing expensive stuff (journalism) that someone else paid for (newspapers).
The idea with my startup http://www.windycitizen.com (we did 50,000 uniques last week...and now apache crashes every 2 hours :( ) is to bring NEW stuff to the web. I want to fill holes in the internet. 3-4 times a week we publish exclusive original stuff. Last week we scooped the Chicago media so badly that the Tribune ran a copycat version of the story the next day. That was fun. I've never heard of Newsvine breaking a big story.
So yeah, Newsvine's great, but I want to get something going that will support original journalism of the type described in the original link.
Getting it going is rough, of course. I'm bootstrapping based on advice from a few entrepreneurs. I've got an application into the Knight News Challenge, which you can read here: http://garage.newschallenge.org/projects/1-crowd-powered-fro...
The Economist provides actionable intelligence on what's happening in the world. It truly is "news you can use."
Example: Back when I was applying to be a CIA agent (i pulled out after passing the first few steps) the interviewers routinely told me to read the Economist from cover to cover. The CIA considers it the definitive, authoritative consumer news product, full of information you can act on.
Same with the other example mentioned here, Consumer Reports.
That said, even if that's where newspapers go, they're still overstaffed. You don't need 1,000 reporters to break down what's happening in Chicago that week in a useful way.
The link economy that Jeff Jarvis blogs about so much (BuzzMachine.com - a must-read for people interested in the future of news) means you don't need as many people to re-report all the stuff your competitor reported.
Over at my humble Chicago news startup, I'm laying the groundwork for what I believe is the next sustainable metro news model.
Three pieces: 1. A crowd-powered, local link aggregator. Digg for Chicago, to be succinct. Open-source your tip line. Let your readers vote up, discuss and share neat, weird and important local links.
2. A blog network. Stick 2-3 local experts on every topic that newspapers typically assign beat reporters to. Have them aggregate, comment and contextualize 2-3 times a week. Create conversations around hot topics. We started a blog about Lollapalooza over the summer and posted to it just for 4-days. It was a big hit for us and was noticed by every news organization covering the festival.
3. Hard-hitting, impactful reporting/features that draw on what's hot from the link aggregator and the blogs. Once a week we publish something that you absolutely have to know to stay ahead of the conversation. To use blogger lingo, this should be linkbait of the highest caliber.
Anyway, I agree with the assessment in this article. You can either go low-brow (The Chicago Tribune now has a CollegeHumor-style blog that their interns run...it's awful) or you can go high.