I mean, for instance, providing a live video feed or a riot, or videos taken by those in attendance, rather than a reporter talking about the event hours or days later. The video of Gaddhafi being killed, not the reporters seeking to let people know what happened without risking giving offense to any viewers?
It's not particularly relevent to Salon, but I'd prefer to see 'news' be reduced to uncommented raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing. Show people what is happening. As soon as you 'explain' what is happening, regardless of intent, you introduce all sorts of biases and preconceived notions and the like. I would certainly like to see the continuation of long-form well-researched journalism of the past, which takes the raw news items and correlates them, provides context and meaning, etc, but I think that should be separate from 'news' reporting. It is article writing, which has been important in society for ages. Even though it was originally created due to the technological limitation of not being capable of finding original raw material, it does add significant value so it makes sense to keep it.
However, any medium like this responds to social trends. Society has been trending anti-intellectual for over 50 years with no sign of slowing. People do not want to stop and think, they do not want to be exposed to news that jars them out of their comfort zone. They do not want to read about ideas different from their own. They certainly do not want any analysis of the ideas they do hold as true, they see that as attack.
A big help to long-form journalism would be moving away from the concept of central agencies that employ these reporters. What do those agencies provide? Nothing. They used to aggregate reporters together, give them access to technological resources, editors, etc. All of that can be done by some software with an Internet connection. Take the entire revenue of one of those large agencies, and provide it directly to the reporters (they can contract freelance editors online without much trouble). See what kind of quality gets produced then.