Google’s News section rolled out new features yesterday, including their ‘cluster pages,’ which display relevant articles, quotes and timelines for specific news topics. The goal is to provide a richer, deeper collage of the news coverage of a story.
All of that is typical google: organizing the world’s information.
Where they diverge from the norm is in a short link at the top right corner of the page, which instructs, "Add a comment if you are part of this story." You can see an example on the Intel anti-trust topic page, here.
The link leads to a data submission form, and quotes are theoretically integrated into Google’s representation of a news topic.
Collecting quotes from sources has historically been the work of print and television journalists, who have very public love-hate relationship with master-aggregator Google.
Last week Marissa Mayer contended that Google and the web would save journalism; this could be a first step.