Stacking the blocks in a new way

There is a fabulous quote in Nieman Lab’s piece last week on how ProPublica balances important and popular content. Though in this case, it refers to making short-term hits out of long-term pieces, we can apply the same concept backwards – or, if we want, in a way that has nothing to do with time:

“We’re taking all the little bits and pieces and making them useful to people in a much more immediate way,” says Amanda Michel, ProPublica’s director of distributed reporting and the developer of the outfit’s overall social strategy. They’re deconstructing the news, and reconstructing it into forms designed to help their readers and serve their mission.

This isn’t just “repurposing content,” which is a vague phrase we hear a lot. Instead, ProPublica is looking closely at the building blocks that come together to make a story, and arranging them in way a that creates brand new content. For ProPublica, this means taking small parts of big, long-term stories, and writing articles that have value in the interim. But most news organizations have bits and pieces that need to be made into bigger stories. So we could do the same thing, only in reverse.

If most stories about Congress revolve around a particular piece of legislation, then we can indicate as much when we publish an article. Then, when we’ve got 10 stories over two months on a piece of legislation, we can use each individual, short-term article to dynamically build a larger look at the development, challenges or importance of the bill.

Normally, this might be done by a beat writer who has all the bits and pieces rolling around in his head, and makes them into a longer feature. But by doing a better job of categorizing and organizing our day-to-day efforts, we can create new, big picture stories to tell without publishing a new article. In fact, who needs a big blob of text when we’ve generated the raw data ourselves? Let’s look at the individual instances news from a different angle, and present that timeline or visualization of the the life of a story to the reader as content that’s just as valuable.

More here and here, which you’ve hopefully already read.

— via Megan Garber

08.28.2011 | post | Journalism | , , , , , | Feedback (0)

A librarian for news

Andrew Spittle jotted down this thought-provoking idea: What if news organizations had librarians? What would that look like?

The news librar­ian is one who can help the moti­vated but intim­i­dated cus­tomer find the infor­ma­tion they are look­ing for. More than that, though, they can help train them in the skills to get the most of their news prod­uct. They can teach dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing tech­niques and sources avail­able to their cus­tomers.

My thoughts in response:

Intrigu­ing thought.

I’ll dial things back slightly and sug­gest we focus first on orga­niz­ing the news web­site more like a library — but with­out the human librar­ian. When I go to a library, I rarely inter­act with the librar­ian. I use the com­puter ter­mi­nals to find my book or media, and then I go locate the item in the stacks. I can do this by myself because libraries are great at orga­niz­ing their data in an easy-to-use (and stan­dard­ized!) way.

News web­sites and orga­ni­za­tions, of course, gen­er­ally suck at this. We have few sys­tems that help users find infor­ma­tion on a sin­gle (some­times highly spe­cific) topic, and the ones we do have are insuf­fi­cient.

I like your idea, but I think bet­ter ways of clas­si­fy­ing or cat­e­go­riz­ing our data are more cru­cial — Stijn’s ideas are a great jump­ing off point, and I think adding con­text can be wrapped into this dis­cus­sion too.

Maybe we need the librar­ian to show up and lead the charge in infor­ma­tion orga­ni­za­tion. Of course, this issue isn’t any­where near the top of the to-do list at many shops, at that doesn’t help things at all.

06.10.2011 | post | Journalism | , | Feedback (0)

Does the news article tell us too much? Or not enough?

Neiman Lab says one of this week’s can’t-miss pieces on the future of news is Jonathan Glick’s “The News Article Is Breaking Up.” In it, Glick says news stories are becoming antiquated as readers get more and more used to consuming news as “nuggets” or tidbits like tweets, status updates, photos, and more:

On smartphones, through which the vast majority of the world’s population will get their news, people love succinct and scannable information. We are gravitating to formats that do not require us to click through and consume paragraphs of prose.

There is no question that these more sleek information formats are useful and well-received. But to suggest that these will replace the standard article is far too aggressive, if for no other reason than that these nuggets rarely contain enough context to be useful on their own, and rarely do they answer more questions than they ask.

Consider a late-night tweet from last April telling you that a government shutdown had been averted. Sure, this news nugget has value: I now know that the government will stay open. But I don’t know why it didn’t shut down, what deals were made, who cut them, what the important political actors have to say, or really anything else. That tweet doesn’t satisfy your information craving. It just whets your appetite and sends you in search of a more information.

It’s no mistake that the news article format has evolved the way it has. First we tell people what’s most important. Then we tell them what is secondarily salient and what else is relevant. We also tell them why it matters.

Of course, this is why tweets contain links and why we have bookmarking tools to highlight pieces we want to read later. But others can lay out how Glick’s idea is misguided. Let’s look at something else – like how it might not even be misguided. Instead, it might just off by an order of magnitude.

Here’s how the news nugget idea holds water: For many complicated topics, the full news article is a nugget – a snapshot, really – of an evolving story or process. Glick talks about how long-form writers will be able to capitalize on making sense of the uber-short tidbits he discusses, but it’s really these article-level snapshots that need making sense of. Certainly this context can come from a long analysis of a certain topic – like how actions in the Middle East are shaping American foreign policy. But we need an even simpler way to do this. A way to paint a better picture of how one snapshot fits into the metaphorical photo album that is a news storyline.

Storyline, perhaps, is the keyword here. In the television industry, producers make sure viewers are caught up on the show’s storylines by starting each episode with a “Previously, on [insert show title here]” montage. Each news article should have the same ability to ask and answer: Are you new here? Are you in over your head? Let us show you – step by step, if you like –  how we got to this point.

We can go even further. If you found a six-month old article via a search engine, we could not only tell you what happened prior to this story’s publication, but also what happened after. We could tell you what started it all – and what the final outcome was, if there is one. We could assign a status and description to a storyline. We could organize them by their major players, and say which storylines fit into or are spin-offs of other ones.

There is a ton more to say on the topic of context, and this idea doesn’t address many, many of the problems we haven’t yet solved. But this kind of easy-to-provide background has the chance to help move us in the right direction, in terms of how well readers consume the information we provide.

By the way, this functionality is basically begging to built a WordPress plugin or other open-source offering. If anyone wants to collaborate, you know where to find me.

06.03.2011 | post | Journalism, Storytelling | , , , , | Feedback (0)