Just post everything
An interesting idea from the Center for Citizen Media: Just post everything, and make it open for public use. For example:
Here’s a simple way public TV and radio stations could help seed the public sphere: Every time they go to a press conference or cover an event where a public figure — politicians, celebrities, high-profile business people, etc. — is speaking, the media organization should post on the Web the entire event, not just the snippets it chooses to run as part of a news report. Moreover, the material should be posted under a Creative Commons license allowing further and wider use.
Then, public media should ask the public for the audio and video the rest of us capture of public figures, and post it all. Then work with search engines to ensure that the material gets indexed properly so we can find it. (One simple approach would be to post it on the Internet Archive.)
One of the things I like about this is that it would facilitate citizen reporting of these events. The pros will do it their way (certainly important). But citizens might find alternative moments of civic interest in these events. So what you would get is a series of reports from multiple points of view.
Do people have time to be looking at multiple reports about the same topic (not to mention the time to cover the topic for their fellow citizens)? Well, no. But an audience would form for such reporting.
Plus, we can dream of a day when this kind of thing would be more interesting and fun than some forms of mindless entertainment.
Agree! We can gain momentum by being the historical record.