Here’s a nice idea from Bad Science blogger Ben Goldacre: a repository of news ingredients:

• A website that gives each news story a unique ID.
• Any involved party can add / upload a full press release or quote to that story’s page
• Anyone can add a link to a primary source
• Anyone can vote these up or down like on digg/reddit
• You can register as a “trusted source” and not need to be modded up or down
• Anyone can add a link to media coverage of that story

You could have a browser plugin that pinged you to the frontpage.org (whatever) site whenever you were reading a piece that was covered there.

So:

• Journalists could use it to source info in one place
• Readers could use it to get unmediated / unedited access to full comments from interested parties
• Involved parties would have a platform for unmediated access too
• It would be fun and easy for comparing different outlets’ coverage of stories (which a lot of people including me occasionally enjoy doing with Google news search)

It’s a good idea.

I’m not sure how workable using the ‘story’ as the unique unit would be (even with all its processing power, Google News performs patchily on clustering along these lines) – and you could use the unit of the ‘issue’ and build on Wikipedia’s engine, but there are problems with this approach too (although it would be fantastic for SEO).

Another way might be to start from ‘source’ given that so many stories are now single-source, i.e. press releases, reports, research, etc. That would make it easier to relate stories to it and build a patchwork of related sources as Goldacre suggests. Indeed, you could use semantic technology to pick out other sources from relevant stories and automatically add them to the page. Also, if each source has its own page you then start to build a patchwork for cross-referencing and context.

Anyway, it’s out there for discussion and improvement. Ideas?