(* Source: Misha Cornes *)

This week USAToday.com revealed a new look and a serious upgrade to its features.  Along with Web 2.0 standards like article tagging, tabbed browsing, and more white space, what you'll really notice are the new community components.

In a clear acknowledgement on the shifting balance between newspaper-as-authority and newspaper-as-content-curator, USAT offers:

• In-screen content feeds from other sources
• Reader comments highlighted against every article
• Digg-style voting for popular stories, with a directional stock indicator
• Photo uploads from citizen journalists
• User profile pages
• Recommend stories or comments to other readers

While they have clearly taken some pages from the New York Times playbook, the site goes even further in trying to redefine what a newspaper website can be.  In a letter to readers, the editorial staff lay out their ambitions clearly:

"[The redesign] is a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience."

While USAToday has never been considered a paper of record, it's very significant that America's most-read paper is seeking to democratize news.  When it comes to information consumption, the user is more in control than ever.