When you visit the web sites of CNN, Foxnews, or Yahoo, you’re getting news delivered in a new way (the internet) but according to a very old system: THEY supply the stories and your only choice is to take it or leave it. But what if you had some say in what stories got posted?

Enter Newsvine, a new service that enables you to “seed” the news - that is, to plant stories that interest you. Before you click here to visit Newsvine, let me mention that Newsvine is now in private beta, so you may need an invitation to get in. I’ll send you one if you’re interested.

Newsvine has all the AP newswire content that other sites have, but users help determine what stories get noticed. Tonight, I seeded Newsvine with the story from Relevant magazine about MySpace that I blogged about here a few days ago. I was the first one to seed that story, so the link to it becomes part of my “column” which I can add to over time. It’s a good article, but without me seeding it, no one searching for articles on Newsvine about related topics would ever find it. If others find it and rate it highly, it’s positioning on the site goes up.

And if you have writing ambitions, you can do your own reporting on Newsvine. I haven’t played around with this yet, but I heard the founder interviewed on Amber MacArthur’s Inside the Net, and he said that in the past few months beta testing, several amateur authors have attracted attention for the quality of their reporting and have a chance to make an impact (and some money) for their work.

We’ve all complained about the media focusing their attention on the wrong things. This gives us a chance to change that…or maybe to prove we’re just as bad!