I like the group idea. The only thing that I would change would be maybe to make it into a group wiki about ongoing stories.

For example, lets take the presidential elections. Everyone in the group could add their own stories or stories that they have highlighted about individual candidates, news stories that will have an affect on the elections, and, in general, news they think matters about elections. Within the group would be moderators who would pick the best stories and build up the wiki for the presidential election. They could organize it so that each candidate, each party, news affecting the elections, and whatever else they deemed important would get a page.

These pages would be populated with links to the good stories pertaining to the pages subject with a synopsis from the moderators. This way the pages would grow organically providing the reader with the best possible information about the subject they were looking for all in one centralized location.

I don't know, maybe this is exactly what you were proposing but nevertheless I think it is a good idea and would be a great resource for people 

Is NowPublic on Twitter? I don't use it but I know a lot of people do. Basically, Twitter is a service that allows you the ability to update subscribers to your feed about what you're doing. NowPublic would seem to be a natural fit for a service like this. Send out messages about breaking news and top stories to the subscriber. Heck, even let the subscriber pick the feed they want (politics, life, culture, etc.). This tool would keep people engaged in the site even while they're away from their computers. And, if a contributor happens to be in the area of a breaking story they could get a heads up via their Twitter account and go and cover that story.

What do I want? I'd dearly love it if all photos attached to a story didn't have to share the same header, which often doesn't make sense for each individual photo in a package. Is there a way to not have that automatically happen, and instead to have an input line with the photo info that says something like "This photo was originally uploaded by xxx as part of a package for the story yyyyy?"

Also, the automatic "tagging" picks up any stray word on sections of a page when we highlight. Sometimes it picks up words not even associated with the main content. Frankly, having to either a) let random words of no tagging value, or inaccurate words, show up or b) delete all the automatic tagging and start fresh typing in appropriate tags drives me nuts! It's a great time-waster, and I notice that many contributors just don't bother with changing tags, probably for that reason.

There probably is a way to have the name of the photo uploaded remain the same as the actual source, but it wouldn't be too helpful- digital cameras give their output such illuminating titles as "1004_34.jpg" and so forth... they have to be changed anyway, so they may as well start out as something relevant to the destination story.

With auto-tagging, we err or the side of more rather than less, since we find that, when left to our own devices, the number-one thing forgotten is the addition of tags.

I hope no offense is taken when I mention the other article sites to which I belong, none is meant.

I seriously suggest that a good look is taken at the way Blogger implements widgets for their authors.  It is so customizable and makes life exceptionally easy for the writer.

I know that we're not a blog here, but the same system could be implemented, even if the format of the pages are different.

As for profiles - Blog Catalog does an excellent job with these.  Rather than promote myself here, if anyone would like to see my profile to see how it works, please let me know.

I think turning NP into into a social community would be a mistake - there are oodles of them out there now.  However, BigT has the right idea (in my opinion,) with his suggestion of turning each group discussion into a Wiki.

The buzz out there is that Wikis are the way to go, because people don't have to travel the net to find out more on a topic that they're interested in, plus it keeps readers on our site.

With regard to tagging, I'm not sure how that works here yet (I've just joined,) but do all the tags lead to other NP writers or off-site?  Associated Content only tags to other writers within their system, so that even though the reader might not stay on your articles, at least they're staying on the web site.
       ~ Swan

Hi Swan,

I'll pass your design suggestions onto our designer; it's admittedly not my department.

 But to give some insight in to the tagging system. When you tag an article a 'tag taxonomy' page is generated for each specific tag. See here for an example of all the articles tagged with 'hockey'.  So it doesn't link directly to other users but rather to their content. But yes, they are all internal links. 

For developing and ongoing news events the staff will often tag all related content with a standard tag to organize the info. See here.  

Highlight currently doesn't work on FireFox 3.0. Since that is going live on Tuesday, that would be a good addition.

Actually, we're testing a FF3 Highlight version as we speak... watch for it immintnetly!

Sweetness...I just installed FF3 yesterday and said "umm...that might have been a bad idea." Maybe it's not such a bad idea afterall!

Wow...I just noticed that I posted this just over a year ago...how about a wrap up? :)

GROUPS:
I'd still like to see something like this. I think if you are enterprising enough you could use RSS feeds, forums, your dashboard and your profile to do this...I still think it would be conducive to creating a "web editorial team" if you will, by creating a group and managing it all on the site.

PROFILES:
I think NP accomplished the spirit of what I was talking about with the user dashboard (sweet). Also, I think the spirit of what I was talking about with pushing people to other content via your profile page has also been implemented. In time maybe a little more tweaking, but for now the idea works :)

Yes, NowPublic is on Twitter... We exist as nowpublic, and we tweet the ongoing popular good stuff.

Yeah, all my custom themes got dumped from FF3, along with several add-ons. So far, our test version of Highlight is working well, with a few fixes to make it as user-friendly as can be.

I like to make my news pretty....Can we get a full rich text editor ...please...Not all of us are hotmail geniuses...Thank you

P.S. Please get in sink with Google Chrome...Great Browser!!