It’s Sunday, and talking heads say maybe it’s time for papers to panic… one quote that struck me from that article was the Charlotte copy editor who said “We are all just kind of stuck in that old model and we haven’t figured out how to get out of it yet.”
Advice is cheap, and man is this future-of-newspaper problem producing a lot of it. Here is more.
I’ve written about potential products that can be added to news article pages before. That’s all well and good, but there are distinct problems with the article as a means of presenting information too (I have posts tangential to this topic in the Step Away From The Article category).
Article: Before
Taking this theme one step further, I pulled one of the breaking news articles from my employer’s web site today. Here it is, at the time I read it:
What’s distinct to me about this page, this piece of information, is how few links there are within the article.
Many newspapers, the Post included, realized the “Dead-End Article” was a problem online, and took a few steps to correct it. Many cases, the Post’s included, those steps seem to be founded on the “this is what else we can add to the page within our CMS’ constraints, and with little additional effort.” That often results in a list of articles directly related to the current article, a list of overall most’s (popular / discussed / emailed), and a list of recent news from that particular section. Those lists don’t address the possibility presented in the article information itself, which is what I focused on in my re-do of this article.
Article: After
Below is a mockup I made of that article page as it could live on the internet. It’s re-organized and includes additional context and information (all made up for the sake of example). It’s what I imagine would be a useful way to address the presentation of a piece of breaking news on a news organization’s web site. I’m not an awesome designer, and I didn’t want to work hard on the look-and-feel of this, because that’s not what this exercise is about.
Explanation
I didn’t “design” links into this mockup for one main reason: everything can be linked. Each statistic can link to more detail about the information it presents. Each piece of information I added is structured, and structured information is much easier to link with other like-minded pieces of structured information. Much easier to link means much less likely to be a dead-end. Less likely to be a dead-end means much more useful information. For more on this structured data stuff, read Adrian Holovaty’s classic A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change, as well as his article Dynamic News Stories.
What would be necessary to make this information presentation possible
News organizations already have the reporting muscle — that’s not the challenge. Breaking the information into re-usable pieces is. Getting specific is. To get specific, this is a high-level on what it would take to publish the information presented in that mockup:
- Creating archives of all the death-related news published takes people on the online production side.
- Creating the tools publishing county-related news lists takes web developers and online producers.
- Creating and maintaining statistic counts on deaths in a geographic region takes producers and librarians and reporters.
- Creating a means of dynamically publishing relevant statistic counts on news articles takes developers.
- Creating a way to integrate single-point locator maps into news articles takes developers.
- Creating a way to integrate themed multi-point maps into related articles takes developers. Creating and maintaining those maps takes producers and librarians and reporters.
- Creating a way to integrate specific related-news lists into articles takes developers.
It’s worth noting that with the exception of the statistics, all of this data is low-overhead data to produce. Adding an article about a death to a death-article list in a reasonable CMS would take about five to ten clicks, max. The major work is building the tools to allow for information to be published in this way.
Thoughts? Share them here.
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