I would love to see a wiki variant used for reporting/discussing news. Why? Because I think that the collaborative wiki process could generate more complete, and more concise news stories than an edited newspaper or magazine.
I feel that the single thing most lacking is a filtering system. See RatedChangeAggregator for more on why, and for what I propose.
See the older ArchivingNews.
See also TimeStream. TimeStream is a visionary idea for how cultures should deal with news information. This page is about something that would be a wiki or a wiki derivative for news. So, this page is confined to wiki-like things, and is less visionary than TimeStream.
See also WikiLog. A WebLog is chronologically ordered, and hence seems appropriate for news. However, a WebLog, and a WikiLog, can be used for more than just conveying news (for example, they can convey personal ideas or be used for general discussions). By contrast, this page is specifically about a tool for transmitting news.
Related idea: WikiFeatures:IdeasToPlace #46: Timeline tools. Make it so you can overlap timelines published on different wiki, and publish those overlaps for other people to see. It'd have a lot of visualization features, so that you could change the marks on the timeline, or change the colors of different timelines, and have a nice key to go with it all.
The news system you're talking about; I think it's a little more structured than just vanilla wiki. I'd also wonder: People are very particular about how news is presented. And the lifetime of these news items (unless we do something like TimeStream) is very short. Thus, there's a lot of room for strong-arming. Hmm… If you confine the news to a particular culture, though, and have some very simple security systems, I think it'd be fine. – LionKimbro
Wikipedia:Current_Events is close, but its focus is on providing encyclopedic background to the headlines. – StephenGilbert
So how about WikiNews http://WikiNews.org/ ?