You say "…Ideally, a news web site *could* use the tools of the blog and the wiki to address the problem of timeliness and interestingness — and focus their editorial energy on importance."

Ideally the content in Print should be determined, NOT on a calendar schedule, but a news event schedule. The Product is still delivered on a regular schedule. But editorial gives up chasing the "breaking news".

A sometimes undervalued feature of breaking news is that it creates focus . . for a moment. If journalists had 24/7 access to a wikipedia type site, focused on the local region and it's many ongoing stories, it should make it a lot easier to write the story that will "get the right information, to the right person at the right time in the right form."

It might be the way to deal with the fact that "general interest" news is best delivered by groups forming on the web and Search.

Ideally, the content of Print should be determined, NOT on a calendar schedule, but a news event schedule. The Product is still delivered on a regular schedule. But the editorial gives up chasing the "breaking news". A sometimes undervalued feature of breaking news is that it creates focus for a moment. If journalists had 24/7 access to a wikipedia type site, focused on the local region, it should make it a lot easier for them to "get the right information, to the right person at the right time in the right form."

It seems to deal with the fact that "general interest" news is best delivered by groups forming on the web and Search.

Obviously, the filter/sort function of the daily newspaper is driven to a large extent by its material form and production schedule.

But news-covering blogs and television, too, get sucked into the relentless linear pull of time.

Even though you have tags and archives or containers that effect a different sorting criteria, you could argue that the architecture of the traditional single-column blog or 24-hour news channel is even *less* sophisticated than the mechanisms of the newspaper, despite (or because of?) their greater ability to revise or react to events as they happen.

Wikipedia for the most part is not like this. It changes and adapts and expands over time, which is its virtue relative to the print encyclopedia, but it is also relatively stable and achronological — its virtue relative to the ephemeral web — and driven primarily by interestingness, not chronology (or even importance).

Ideally, a news web site *could* use the tools of the blog and the wiki to address the problem of timeliness and interestingness — and focus their editorial energy on importance. I’m thinking of a web site that might mix aspects of a magazine with a blog with a community portal, etc…