Philip van Allen's piece on interaction design for online news was sitting around in a Firefox tab for quite a while. I was just about to nuke it but instead dug in a bit. Good choice.
van Allen forwards a notion of "productive interaction", where interacting with media is not so much consumption as production. This has huge potential online where the ability to interact is so much greater than with paper.
What's being produced? There could be other media objects, or personalized configurations of a media space, or, at the highest level "sense". Through interaction, the user produces an understanding of the media, i.e. they "make sense" of the work.
Productive interaction as a design philosophy is proposed by van Allen as a way to get online news out of its current local maximum. News sites are starting to fossilize. However, productive interaction is somewhat perilous in that users can actually fail to produce what the author intended and it takes a lot of up front thinking about what the user can do. This will probably have to be explored out on the fringes of the media commons before the big boys even think of adopting it.
I'm not sure if there's really anything new here, hypermedia folks have been struggling with similar issues for years, but put in the context of news a little bulb went off in my head.