News rises.
It's literally pushed up and spread around by the great cloud of readers.
This is an entirely new model of how to value and distribute news. The media is losing its official role. It's more about who finds what news item, then shares it with whoever else, which, by some zeitgeist and algebraic force, launches it.
For everybody in the news business, the question is about how we adapt to this--or resist it.
Pay walls, and Rupert Murdoch's half-cocked determination to block Google, and notions about exclusive provider relationships, are all efforts, not only to make additional dough, but to stop this new, disorienting, anarchic redistribution--this disintermediation, this de-professionalization of news.
The opposite idea is to go with it, encourage it, and, even, hitch your wagon to it--wherever it leads.
Today, on Newser's homepage, below our curated grid--the place where our editors and algorithms select news that is read (and then redistributed) by almost 2.5 million people every month--we add a new grid. This new grid--Newser by Users--is a pure instance of user redistribution. We merely provide the tools to help find, and publish--or redistribute, if you will--the news, with whatever commentary and picture a user (but is a user still a user who becomes a provider?) might want to add. Beyond that, there's no involvement on our part. Anybody can post whatever he or she wants. At anytime. Oversight will consist of only an eye for prosecutable libel and obscenity.
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