Helium tries to push Zones as a new concept, but it seems oddly familiar. It's a "rich web destination dedicated to whatever you want it to be" with the possibility of several writers contributing to the same Zone.
Let's call spade a spade: it's a website. With words and images. Essentially, Google's Blogger, Wordpress or any other blogging service can serve the same purpose; Helium tries to make a distinction between professional writers and other writers, but that line has already been blurred. Create a blog, slap some ads on it, and boom: you're a professional writer. Whether you're any good is beside the point; all that counts on the net is how many people are reading your stuff and how much money you're making.
As far as presentation goes, Helium Zones look more like online newspapers than blogs; content can be arranged into boxes of various sizes containing text, links, videos and images. You can also add live information such as weather info, or give other members of Helium the possibility to add content themselves. And, of course, you can add Google, Amazon or eBay ads and share revenue with Helium. Unfortunately, the design of Zones (and they all look quite similar) is a bit bland and leaves a lot to be desired.
Whether this will work better than "standard" blog form is debatable; I think that, for the most part, it won't. It is, however, better for certain types of content; for example, offering a relatively static archive of articles about a subject. In this sense, Zones are competing with Google's Knol, which is probably not a very good place to be in, especially since Knol itself hasn't taken off the way Google wanted it to.
On the other hand, Helium has a relatively large community (over 100,000 members), plus some additional perks: members get access to Helium's marketplace for freelancers, guaranteed payments for qualifying articles that make it to Helium.com, and "professional writer credentials" and a "status badge" that proves you're a pro writer, which you can probably do without. Furthermore, unlike Knol which merely lists a couple of featured Knols on the front page, Helium tries harder to push content on the front page, featuring more articles and dividing them into categories called "channels."