This sounds like
FreeRepublic
with pretty pictures on the front page:
BLOGGING: MAJOR Revolution Underway As N.C. Paper Veers To
Incorporate Blogging and
More Undercurrent: Action in Greensboro on Open Source
Journalism
'Our editor and M.E. have asked me to figure out how we might
change our Web site into more of an online community or public
square. ...'
There aren't a lot of specifics, so Rosen and Gandelman are free to
speculate and imagine and come up with suggestions.
FreeRepublic is a conservative community where, if you're
registered, you can post articles, either from other sources, or
vanity / 'opus' threads. Likewise, if you're registered, you can
comment in the threads.
Along with the threads sourcing other sites, many times 'Live
Threads' are started, on subjects as diverse as the baseball
playoff games, political conventions, SpaceShipOne, and general and
primary elections. Thread views can reach 20,000+.
Members can construct a home page at FR and follow their state or
other locale's commentary. There are a lot of 'ping lists', where a
freeper or three maintains a list of other freepers interested in a
particular subject, and once a thread is started touching on that
subject, the list gets notified by a comment pinging
listmembers.
Because of the large membership, the knowledge and experience is
truly mind-boggling. Comments, ideas, explanations are posted and
subjects and questions dissected as you watch or participate.
Up until the
The sixty-first
minute, Powerline's post on the 60 Minutes II Bush memo story,
FreeRepublic was pretty much self-contained, but
Buckhead's post at Post #47 in Documents Suggest Special Treatment
for Bush in Guard (and
TankerKC's: Post #107 in Live Thread: Ben Barnes and CBS Attempt
Another Bush Smear (60 Minutes), though Powerline didn't
reference that post) was the first instance, AFAIK, that freeper
commentary and analysis escaped, into the blogosphere or
elsewhere.
Freeper hispanarepublicana created a thread
Occasions
when FR has Scooped Old Media (vanity thread listing), and the
list is impressive:
What FreeRepublic doesn't have, of course, is a staff gathering
news. It does have editors, in the form of moderators, who can
delete posts, pull threads, and ban or suspend members. Newspapers
have the reporters, and they ought to investigate developing a
hybrid webpaper-FreeRepublic site.
Updated to correct some typos.