Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow reports on what appears to really be a super major news items for anyone seriously interested in seeing how independent newsmakers are about to create a world-wide independent news clearinghouse.

Called wikinews this new project is set to become a free alternative news source to which anyone can contribute. Built upon the open collaborative wiki-model it allows maximum abilities for contributions and comments.

Wikinews wants to become an alternative force to established, major private news agencies. It wants to provide a first grassroot alternative to mainstream news aggregation agencies while allowing full reusability of its content to anyone.

Independent publishers participating in wikinews will be able to select, aggregate and custom syndicate their favourite news sources and stories without having to pay anything to anyone.

Hey....this is just f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c !

Here is the full excerpt from Cory's announcement:

"We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere.

Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere.

It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is,

it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting.

Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work.

Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not requiring registration before reading."

More info: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews

Stay tuned for more info on this as they arrive.
(The project needs yet to launch, and I know you want to sign-up for it.)

Question:

I would like to suggest the Creative Commons to organize or co-ordinate a way to seamlessly integrate CC into news aggregating tools and services so that when I want to mix, rip and feed my news feeds I know that I can do so without breaking anyone's rules.

Anyone out there?