We've more submissions than news slots [...] available for many months to come right now.
I'm sorry, but this makes no sense to me. Let me elaborate on what I have been hoping that FDev would do for a long time.
Currently there are 795 player factions (according to EDDB data) and they are present in 3,549 systems (again, according to EDDB data). If each player faction was allowed to post local articles across all systems they're located in, this would mean that there would be 3,549 systems that could be fed constant player generated news.
Obviously it would be a privilege and not a right, and as such the articles would be screened at random to ensure that they are not breaking various rules (150 to 175 words is easy enough to enforce automatically, other rules not so much), and multiple breaches (or a single one that is bad enough) results in the faction no longer having the privilege of posting to local galnet.
How to manage it? Well, in order to register as a player faction, a forum account is required, which means that there are 795 forum accounts associated with those player factions. Set up a subforum where those accounts (and only those) are allowed to post articles along with a sister forum to discuss the articles (including posting drafts etc), and make it such that the game pulls the articles directly from the first forum into the game.
You already know which forum accounts are connected to which factions, so a post by the Alliance Office of Statistics account would automatically be posted to all the systems that AOS is present in at the time of publication, and if a post is egregious enough, the Alliance Office of Statistics looses the privilege of posting directly to Galnet and instead has to go through the regular process. On the flip side, if an article is interesting enough it can be escalated to be galaxy wide, super power wide (think all Alliance, Empire or Federation systems) or power wide (think all systems controlled, exploited or contested by Edmund Mahon or Arissa Lavigny-Duval).
Seriously - with almost 800 player factions present in more than 3,500 systems, why is FDev manually curating all of the news items for the more than 20,000 populated systems? It makes no sense to do so. FDev should be curating the overarching story line, but let the player groups tell the stories that they're working on every single day. It's completely uninteresting to more than 99.9% of the populated systems what the Alliance Office of Statistics has to say on, for example, the Thargoid situation, but it makes perfect sense to have their views heard in the systems they inhabit.
My way would make for a far more living galaxy than what we see today, and a far more living galaxy than could ever be possible by FDev curating every single article across the galaxy. It would open up entirely new forms of warfare (propaganda warfare in systems where multiple player factions are vying for control for example), and it would make the small player groups feel far more involved in the galaxy, because suddenly their little corner is no longer relegated to only having auto-generated content that is about as interesting to read as the ingredient list on oatmeal.
