Hi James, you may be interested in my site, Newslines, which covers all of your points.
The basic problem is that a paper newspaper is not suited to the web. Imagine when the TV was invented if people just showed a newspaper on the screen. If that sounds stupid then consider that that’s what newspapers are doing on the web. Each media requires its own formats. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”. Today’s news media is failing because it is trying to put a paper edition of the news onto the web. Instead, it must understand three things 1) news is data 2) everyone is has small mobile screens (and no time) and 3) the audience determines the content.
On the web there simply isn’t any need for the same news to be spread out over hundreds of different news sites. Google News does a good job of sorting through all those sources, but you still have to go to to the source articles, all of which have their own formats, and are are full of repetition, inconsistencies and bias. Wouldn’t it be better if the news was all in one place? In fact, this is what Facebook is trying to do, by collecting and presenting all your social and external news. But they do it poorly.
At Newslines, our aim is to collect and summarize all of the world’s news, from the past to the present, into timelines about each topic. Our team scans articles and creates a news event (data) that is made from the factual information and quotes in the article. Then we adds a related video. We put each news event into a database and tag and interlink it to other news events. The result is a cross between daily news, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google Search. We hope that by being specifically built for news we can give people the kind of news you are looking for in your article.
As an example, check our newsline of Emma Sulkowicz (“Mattress Girl”). Because the news is data the newsline can be read forwards (news view) or backwards (biography view). This latter view beats Wikipedia, which is not built for news, and is full of bias. And despite being compiled from highly partisan sources, the entire newsline has minimal bias because we only extract the factual information from the source article. Another good example is our newsline of Lady Gaga’s ex-manager, Troy Carter.
As for suitability for mobile, we have found that our news summaries are perfect for updated news about a single topic, and through our collaboration with the largest set of Facebook fan pages for Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter, we have been able to drive over one million unique visitors/month to our Conor McGregor newsline, which is the best archive of his news on the web.
We are looking for people to contribute and to help us spread the word. If you’d like to chat more feel free to contact me at info@newslines.org
