I wrote a long post a while ago about the newspaper business and the challenges for media and knowledge institutions in the digital age. One of my thoughts was that the real role of a newspaper is not so much producing content (though that is important), but more fundamentally helping readers make sense of the world. And so part of their role is filtering content well. Applied to our connected world, that means that newspapers should spend serious time combing the web and providing a filtering service to their readers — by pointing to other sites, even competitors.
The Washington Post has taken my advice, and just launched the Political Browser, which points to important stories around the web.
More of this to come, no doubt.
[via Publishing2.0]