That description probably sounds very similar to Digg's Upcoming section, but this post should help differentiate the two. I'll describe a quick twist that turns an open and fairly loose peer review scheme into a targeted one that (I think) stands a decent chance at providing accurate regional and topic specific news without losing article integrity. Please keep in mind that this is all a continuation of that "perfect news system" discussion from way back.

What does someone living in Wyoming know about the local elections of a Pennsylvania suburb? How can someone who doesn't follow the latest in physics rate the potential validity of an article about the 100 billion light year void in space? I'm betting similar questions can be asked about most stories that don't have to do with iPods or national politics.  This is a problem because the whole point of this giant news system is that it would be comprehensive in its coverage and would contain exactly the type of niche news that is only familiar to niche audiences. This means I'm going to have to take some extra precautions during the review process or people will be voting on articles without any understanding of the related community standards or the surrounding issues.

To address this predicament I'll steal a page from academia and try to target domain experts during the peer review process. Of course it wouldn't be much of a democratic system if I restricted the voting process to proven experts, and figuring out who is an expert simply isn't feasible in such a dynamic setting, so I'll take the next best thing - residence and interest. Since the system is centralized and users specify regions of residence and topics of interest anyway, it should be easy to have members of a given physical or topical community be the ones to review their community's news.

Now, using the targeting method, when an article is uploaded, categorized, and tagged to relevant locations it can be pre-screened by users who are somewhat connected with the affected community.  Clearly a connection doesn't make one an expert, but it does indicate a clue. My underlying assumption here, which I would love for Ben Melançon (and others) to comment on at some point, is that informed individuals (i.e. those with a clue) can do a fine job of democratically moderating the content that falls within their collective domain.

The next thing to do is give the journalists a unique say of their own on top of it all.  That will be a bit trickier, but I have hope that it can be done in an elegant way that makes as many people happy as possible.  I'll open up that can of worms the next time I continue this thread of discussion.