The transparent news tip
Nieman Lab reports that Gawker has created a tip line that can be viewed by all. In a sense, this is a mashup of traditional and social news, with the crowd submitting the content while a array of Gawker editors are able to wade in and pluck the juiciest tidbits to promote to the front page.
This is very similar to the model of Fark, which has a Digg-like submission process but employs actual editors to go in and “greenlight” headlines to the front page. Fark’s ingenuity lies in the fact that they’ve convinced thousands of their most devoted users to purchase “Total Fark” accounts, which allow them to view the raw stream of submitted headlines, regardless of whether they’re greenlit.
