[habitatforus]

It looks great, however the first thing I thought of is Scribd. The NYT Dealbook uses them extensively: http://www.scribd.com/DealBook

I don't mean "They did it don't bother". It might be that your are making a non-profit Scribd focused on social news, and you'll be better because _________.

There is a need for this. There is a general distrust of media, and people want to make their own decision -- your empowering them.

PS. I like the design.

[jashkenas]

Fortunately, DocumentCloud has a very different mission than Scribd, and isn't competing with them in any meaningful way. Scribd is a "YouTube for documents", where anyone can upload and share docs, with all the requisite advertising that entails.

We're a nonprofit organization funded by the Knight Foundation to help make primary source documents accessible. Upload access to DocumentCloud is restricted to journalists -- the current list of contributors can be found here:

http://www.documentcloud.org/contributors

As to the Document Viewer, which is probably what you're talking about (the equivalent of Scribd's embedded viewer), it's funny that you mention the Times, because it's their project. Alan McLean, at the Interactive News desk, created the document viewer for nytimes.com, and they make extensive use of it there (apart from Dealbook). It's also an HTML5 viewer, not a Flash viewer.

http://documents.nytimes.com/court-battle-over-rahm-emanuels...

http://www.documentcloud.org/#search/group%3A%20nytimes

PS. The design is thanks to the very talented Folkert Gorter (superfamous.com)