A user-submitted news site is a news site where all the articles are submitted by the viewers and users of the site.
This has profound implications, but we'll get to those in a minute. First, some examples:
- Slashdot was the first massively popular user-submitted news site. Quite simply, links to articles are submitted to administrators, who post worthwhile stories to the front page. Tech-related.
- Digg lets anyone submit articles and vote on the submissions. Articles with a lot of votes (or "diggs") are pushed to the top of the front page. Most articles are tech- or geek-related.
- Fark relies on users to submit real, offbeat news stories with humorous headlines. Each story gets a discussion thread, many of which amass hundreds of articles.
Most of these sites rely on administrators—special users of the site—to vet the stories. Digg relies on its many users, assuming that many positive votes indicates a worthwhile story.
The implications go well beyond that. User-submitted news sites provide targetted news; if you want technology articles, a site like Slashdot will provide many more articles than any given paper, since it can link to any or all articles from any and all online newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc.
The downside here is that user-submitted news sites don't produce any content themselves. They just link to existing articles. Fark doesn't have any reporters, for example. So they rely on other sites, each of which may have their own agendas, to actually do the reporting.