And, of course, now I feel like I'm making a case to design and build something that's adapted for collecting, corroborating, checking, and editing news during fast-moving events with mass attention and participation. Stack Exchange for journalism or something like that.
This point was raised during the reddit mess -- why doesn't something like this exist? Combine a feature like "twitter news" with a forum-style ui where anyone can input, then add some fact checkers. Force tv news like CNN to change a bit to stay abreast with the market, and we might have a new dawn of investigative news journalism.
@AlderaanDuran used the term "time line" in the other comment and it made me wonder if you can make a timeline the central part of a crowd-reporting UI. Varying levels of zoom, attach events anywhere, some kind of consensus mechanism for moving events up or down in history or relevance as more accurate information comes in. Tablet hardware is perfect for this kind of thing, since moving through timelines and zooming in/out is much more intuitive and faster on touchscreens.