First, please read this piece by Ezra Klein about the future of news.
What he describes is a part of the news system of the future.
News orgs like Vox, which Klein writes for, will continue to post to their own sites. Search engines index the main site and are, and will continue to be an important source of flow. It also serves as a reliable archive of past work.
They will have RSS feeds that point back to their sites.
Some of the people who directly read the feeds are linkbloggers. They pass on links to people they follow, generating flow. I am myself a linkblogger.
New news reading apps will build on the feeds. As Facebook and Twitter become more slow-moving big companies, the opportunities to create new news systems will be limited to their employees if the news only flows to their systems. Luckily, there's no need for that to happen, since almost all web CMS's support RSS. Next steps for all of them is to provide parallel interfaces to Facebook and Twitter.
The stories appear in full text on Facebook. People who read on Facebook are much more likely to read the stories in place than to click on a link. If you want to reach Facebook readers, you must put the full text there. Facebook is of course making this easy.
To compete, Twitter will have to allow full text of articles to appear on Twitter.
All that is on the distribution side. The disaggregation happens on the source side as well.
A news article contains facts, quotes, illustrations and photos.
Reporters used to call sources on the phone for quotes. Today and in the future, the quotes come in the form of speech, by the sources, on networks.
The process of assembling the bits into a story is quicker, easier and more automatable. The tools will keep getting better.
There's an opportunity for new quote-gathering sites. Twitter is far from the best way to do this.
Bits flow out to the open web and to silos.
Quotes come in from the network, and the open web through feeds.
New ideas for reading systems are tried out on the open web.