Newswise has implemented a rapid-response system to major national and international news events that are expected to remain on the front page for several days. For news stories on major events, such as Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, and the Iraq War, many journalists seek experts across a broad array of related topics. The number of relevant stories grows daily, and includes facets of science, medicine, public health, engineering, geology, economics, law, politics, sociology, etc.

Similarly, many higher education and research institutions have experts and want to appropriately and proactively reach many news outlets who would value them.

Breaking News Channels provides the mechanism for brokering this effort by creating a forum for relevant experts, research, and background information. When a major event occurs, Newswise will establish a dedicated channel listing multiple experts and stories. We will also send a Newswise Alert via email inviting our contributing institutions to contribute their relevant experts to Newswise, where they will be included as stories in a regular Library (SciNews, MedNews, LifeNews, BizNews), distributed via the Newswise wires, and included in the appropriate Breaking News Channel.

For feature writers, Newswise has created an exciting new way to generate unique story ideas. Newswise will assign selected ideas to a group with a related topic, such as Winter/Holidays, Nature/Animals, Allergies, and the like.

These groupings of feature ideas will establish a thematic nexus around which writers can peruse, align, and juxtapose ideas so as to create their own unique feature article about a trend, idea or human interest story. The channels will provide a network of support for feature writers and a new way of brainstorming possible features. These groupings of ideas would otherwise have been difficult to access if one were limited to searching for them by keyword; however, having been pre-selected by our editors for relevancy, they have had an additional "intelligence" added to them by grouping them with other related ideas.

In addition to the identified themes, Newswise will have four groups of general feature ideas within science, medicine, lifestyle, and business.

Newswise will expand these channels as necessary, based on the appearance of new story trends or upon specific requests from our users.