Priority 1: Steem needs a heavily curated and well-moderated "breaking news" community

As people are likely aware, there was a political assassination in the United States this week, and that was followed by a not-quite two day police manhunt. I'm not here to talk about the politics of it, but I want to talk about the gap that it reveals in the Steem ecosystem.

Put simply, it is this: When I wanted to learn the latest about breaking events, I went to X (Twitter), not Steem.

In general, breaking news is a huge driver for social media. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's traffic increased by 20-50% for those couple of days.

From my vantage point, however, it appears that Steem gets almost 0 additional traffic when major news events like this happen. In my opinion, solving this should be priority #1 for the community, and we can solve it with almost 0 development effort. We just need planning, participation, and alignment from curators and moderators. In other words, it's an exercise in herding cats.

First, let's think about why Steem doesn't get traffic during these events:

The simple answer is that authors don't change their posting behavior or topics when these events happen. There are very few articles covering the event, and it's hard to find the ones that get created.

The upstream answer is that these facts are true because there is no reliable curation support for breaking news. Why?

1. Organic Steem curators generally require some minimum length, depth, or formatting standards that are impossible to meet during a breaking news event.
2. There's no dedicated place for readers to go to find information quickly. I suppose /trending and /hot were created for this purpose, but they don't really do the job.

In my opinion, this is a gap that the Steem community can and should solve quickly - with almost 0 development cost. Here's how we do our cat herding:

1. Identify enough moderators who are willing to keep the community free of SPAM - like 10 or 15 people or more with solid Steem histories and representation from multiple languages and regions.
2. Create and publicize a community where authors can post about breaking news topics with the rapid speed that's required to stay abreast of current events. (consider adopting a burn requirement(?). I vote "no", but it's worth discussing.)
3. Moderate SPAM aggressively ("My uncle Joe's dog just had these cute puppies.", may be breaking news, but it's probably not the kind of "breaking news" that we're looking for.
4. Organic curators announce in advance their intent to support this community during breaking news events.
5. Wait for a breaking news event. (maybe moderators "activate" the community by creating a pinned post stating that an ongoing event is considered eligible for curation during a certain time period?)
6. Whenever something happens that's attracting widespread attention, organic curators prioritize this community, and they curate it heavily from a neutral point of view.
   1. Focus on relevance, reliability, and primacy:
      1. Is the topic news worthy and relevant?
      2. Is the posted content informative and accurate or at least supported by evidence?
      3. Is this one of the first posts or comments in the community that contains this information?
      4. Is it free of defamatory statements or doxing?
   2. Agreement/disagreement with the author's perspective on the topic is not relevant to curation decisions.
   3. Post "quality" (whatever that means) is maybe not quite irrelevant, but it's heavily deemphasized.

In addition to unpleasant events like this week's assassination, other "breaking news" events might be things like major sporting events, natural or technological disasters, major business events, national election results, etc. So, with feedback from curators, the moderators would need to frequently refine the community rules in order to get the right balance of relevance and timeliness.

One nice thing about sporting events is that they are scheduled in advance, and another thing is that they're not particularly controversial. So, maybe we could use a major sporting event to launch the community with advance promotion?

Over the years, I have learned a lesson about community creation here. You can't just launch a community and watch it grow organically. Without curation support, it is difficult or impossible for any Steem community to survive. Some day, I hope that will change and we'll have enough people here for communities to be self-sustaining with organic membership, but that day isn't today.

So, right now it all depends on the tier-1 and tier-2 stakeholders. If they'll sponsor and support an initiative like this Steem can be a place where breaking news brings readers and grows the ecosystem.

Why would upper-tier supporters and moderators want to get behind an initiative like this? Multiple reasons:

1. Some of the upper-tier supporters would benefit from the increased traffic to their web sites.
2. All of the upper-tier supporters could hope for an increase in their investment's value that results from increased attention on the Steem blockchain.
3. Some of the visitors who arrive will be retained, which will increase the potential value for future initiatives that are directed towards the attention economy.

It's easy to implement, but it requires curator backing and moderator participation. Are those things available? Will Steem be "Carrying the Banner" for major news events in the future?