I also think the future value of news is in the relationship to journalists and reporters. They need to become 'celebrities' to a certain degree. The Huffington Post is a good example.

However, I think the transaction costs of crowd-sourcing articles are too high. People have better things to do then finding topics to fund. It already didn't work for open source projects.

My favorite solution is still the club model as described here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678801