There's money to be made in an open design platform coupled with low-cost curated data feeds. I like being able to customize and tweak how things look on my machine; I loved running Enlightenment on my Linux desktop 10 years ago. And I love and am prepared to pay for good content because I'm a bit of a news addict. But I can't stand the amount of junk on most news websites. Not just adverts - sidebars, useless statistics about which stories are most popular, social buttons, comment dungeons, pictures of journalists, and about ten other varieties of cruft...to say nothing of the poor quality content that I'd like to filter out. I envision something midway between NNTP (the protocol, not the usenet community) and a Bloomberg terminal, but at reasonable cost and with high standards of currency and curation (which is where Wikinews fails currently).
Users choose (and may pay for) the presentation layers that make most sense to them; one person may choose something redolent of newspaper, another person likes their news with Star trek theme, a third inexplicably likes their news delivered by Clippy, the office assistant. Designers offer a wide variety of different presentation and navigation tools to suit the whims of consumers instead of suffocating in an unwinnable race to discover the one format that rules them all from within the bowels of of a media conglomerate; serious journalists get to concentrate on information-gathering, reportage and quality of references, without having to fill an onerous fluff quota ('It's daylight saving time again, and that means rewriting last year's rewrite on daylight saving time!')
Users choose (and may pay for) the presentation layers that make most sense to them; one person may choose something redolent of newspaper, another person likes their news with Star trek theme, a third inexplicably likes their news delivered by Clippy, the office assistant. Designers offer a wide variety of different presentation and navigation tools to suit the whims of consumers instead of suffocating in an unwinnable race to discover the one format that rules them all from within the bowels of of a media conglomerate; serious journalists get to concentrate on information-gathering, reportage and quality of references, without having to fill an onerous fluff quota ('It's daylight saving time again, and that means rewriting last year's rewrite on daylight saving time!')
grumble grumble get off my lawn etc.