Timelines

The thing that bugs me most about news articles (other than the tension) are the jumping around in the storyline. News articles have a format similar to the following:

first paragraph: the most 'new' information
second paragraph: "this comes on the heels of xyz"
third and fourth paragraphs: quotes from people
remaining story: fill in the blanks of the past

I've always appreciated stories that came with a sidebar that featured a timeline. Even better, timelines with links! Even better: collaboratively edited timelines that let the journalist do what she's good at while readers pick up the somewhat tedious work (it's not the most brain-busting thing) of putting events into place.

This assumes:

stuff happens in sequence. Much of life happens in parallel. How to account for that?
it may not be known when who did what, though it could be enough to know what day it happens on, even if it is a 24-hour news cycle

I've seen apps that do collaboratively-edited timelines, and here's a list of what I've come across:

http://www.xtimeline.com/
https://timeglider.com/
http://www.tiki-toki.com/ is it collaborative?
http://timeline.knightlab.com/ open source (GitHub) timeline generator, can use Google Docs as data source
TimeLineCurator

Updates

Timelines