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.
It was striking to see how social, local, and national media interacted in the immediate aftermath of 
