Amazing example of both passion and network-powered media. The network of individuals as well as national and state blogs helped get the story out to raise the money.

What's so great about this? Here's an explanation and then I'll give an example how journos can use it.
"Squidoo is taking things a bit further though, leveraging the concept of Q&As to turn Twitter into a massive content creation service for them, through a new product dubbed Twttrstrm. The idea is to ask a question to your Twitter followers, and have Squidoo place the answers – and lots of supplemental information – on a brand new Lens (the Squidoo equivalent of a Wikipedia page"

On how journos can use this: Say you are at a press conference, a hearing, an event, etc.. and you want to engage your community on what questions to ask. Tweet it and you get all the answers in one spot. Not only that-but you have a platform to engage and organize your twitter communities and their feedback.

The one down side is that it's not directly bringing traffic to the outlet's site (although probably a lot indirectly!). So hopefully, someone will think of how to integrate.