Love your vision of a distributed journalism network. However, I think continued reliance on tracking authority via the link economy is a dated concept.
Our current problems stem from the fact that Google values the publication location of content over the authority of the author themselves. In the real-world we filter information though topical experts (NYT writers, trusted personal referrals, employees of top companies) and we have established systems for discovering and evaluating these authorities.
PageRank was an early attempt to replicate this RW social filtering through the medium of web links, but PageRank has hit the limits of its effectiveness and we now find ourselves in need of a new standard for social filtering on the web.
One solution I’ve been evangelizing recently is to track reputation against authors rather than URLs – a ‘PageRank for People’. Think of it as a portable reputation system for the web – a way of using the authority of content creators (instead of URLs) to collectively filter content.
Here’s a couple of write-ups for more info:
‘Social Search and Distributed Reputation Systems’ (Presented at SES Chicago 2009): http://bit.ly/4YhXq4
‘Docs are Old-School, We Need PageRank for People’: http://www.bit.ly/128U9V
‘Meme-Tracking & the Dynamics of the News Cycle”(Cornell University – PDF): http://bit.ly/WA1tS