I sort of think that the focus on commenting and debate itself is possibly distracting. I think it'd be interesting to see what people think about how users could interact with news more, rather than just interacting with each other.
What exactly is "news", as you are using the word, and how exactly are you proposing that people interact with it? And how exactly is the form of interaction you are seeking already not being done in a world of freely available blogs?
I think the focus on news pieces as being long form text documents is fundamentally flawed. The paragraph (or proposition or whatever) is probably a more natural atomic unit, and makes a bunch of the problems currently plaguing how we interact with news content/knowledge go away.
The idea i've been thinking about, is why can't we harken back to the days of text-based adventures (really the distilled essence of user interaction), and make news queryable and navigable by users?
You get to know what your users what to know about a topic, and how they explore your content, and you can get that info w/o all the social overhead and shouting matchings.
Now I'm glad I asked; I was ready to go off on another tangent that would not have been related.
I've often thought that the New York Times ought to be a wiki, not in the sense that it is publicly editable, but in the sense that the staff ought to be linking stuff together much more aggressively. Why isn't there a page on the New York Times I can go to that is Their Index for Guam? (Deliberately choosing a neutral topic to avoid trigger political reactions.) All their stories collected, sorted, in some chronological order, etc., with new stories added as they come in. The value of the NYT is greatly lessened by being an undifferentiated mass of articles. It would even help them in their own research.
How dare you mention Guam! The US military's decision to move pacific operations there is going to destroy the culture and subject the populace to the sorts of abuses they're guilty of in Okinawa!
Okay, i'm kidding. :)
The real problem with hyperlinking is that it's difficult and time consuming. Wikipedia can kinda manage it because there are thousands of Wikipedians with a lot of free time. The NYTimes is the opposite. They're a smallish organization trying to do original news reporting and research, and put it up online. Time spent deciding what hyperlinks to put where are a distraction from the other stuff they could be doing.
That's why time has been spent on systems like Apture, which are frankly, completely useless. Automated systems can't provide the sorts of editorial control that users actually want to find out more info.
In short, wikis are really hard for organizations to build and maintain, if it's not core to what it is that they do. And they're particularly hard for quick moving targets.
