Here are my top 5 ideas, I'll post 5 more less developed ones and see if anyone can come up with something, or if they can pair up with other ideas. Steve, I love your ideas, they all seem really developed and well-thought out. I like the idea of a personal news team, too. Anyway, here are my ideas:

1) Develop a Web site about college sports, mainly Division II and III considering they get the least publicity on major stations like ESPN and the major news channels. Users (which would be aimed at journalism/mass comm. majors) can upload pictures, videos, audio, and stories about games, players, or teams onto the site and it would be organized by divisions, conferences, and teams. For instance, if I filmed, edited and added audio to a 3 minute piece that recapped the St. Michael's men's lacrosse season, I could upload it to this Web site and make it available to the public. Local newspapers and online sources can then get ahold of these uploads (especially articles) and use them as sources to generate their own stories. It would be sort of a press release for other news sources, to get small, unheard of stories out to the public.

2) Develop the same type of Web site but make it all photojournalism based. Allow students with a legitimate college e-mail address to upload their pictures from their school's newspaper and make it available to the public. It could go even deeper into possibly creating a free trade network of pictures, or for images that are extremely rare or in the news spotlight (i.e. a picture from inside the buildings when the V Tech shooting was going on) would be downloaded by other users at a price. Basically this Web site would be like the Associated Press of the college news industry.

3) Design a Web site that allows users to "create their own newspaper." Some people only want the sports section while others want the front page news. So my idea is to create a digital newspaper, that looks like a spread and is written like print media. This could be good for the niche of people that love newspapers; it would be a newspaper online that looks like a newspaper, it's not written in a new form to fit the online media style. So someone that likes reading about the top news stories would have a home page on this site that looks like the front page of a newspaper and is filled with the top stories, filtered from the major newspapers (i.e. NY Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal).

4) Create a Web site that takes all the major headlines around the country, and assign bloggers/journalists to write a story exactly opposite of what it's saying, to create complete opposition. For instance, today President Bush the stem cell bill, saying "I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line." Credit this article to NY Times. Then, flip the story around explaining why we should be in favor of stem cell research (is President Bush's decision a conflict of church and state? will this block thousands of lives that could be saved if the bill was passed?) By doing this, people will no longer be victims of news outlets slants (Fox right, CNN left) and instead will get two stories from the same source, allowing the person to take their own opinion on it, but be fully informed.

5) Create a Web site that is about global news, and import all the news from news sources other than AP, Reuters, etc. Importing pictures and stories from media outlets like BBC is better because they usually have correspondants in these countries, and it wouldn't be a generic story (or picture) like AP provides. By importing stories/pictures from unique sources like Al Jazeera.net (http://english.aljazeera.net/English) news will be more fair and balanced, from sources outside of the US and possibly cover stories that the US news medias are forced to censor because of FCC regulations. For instance, if a picture was posted of a line of coffins with American flags covering them (a picture of dead soldiers being flown home, which would never make a front page in the US because of government censors), allow this to be posted on the Web site. I guess what I'm getting at with this idea, which is hard to explain, is create some kind of Web site that tells it how it is--no politics, no claim to fair and balanced coverage, just truth. The age old saying of "a picture's worth 1000 words" would be the backbone of the concept. By headlining photos as the main story, with detailed cutlines, I think news would have more impact on viewers, especially as more and more people are visual learners.