1. Provide context about the exact place that I live. Context makes information actionable.
2. Make accessible and linkable historical information about the place that I live. News sites are a community resource — time to start acting like one.
3. Give news sites exponentially more entry points to the information they’re already publishing. More entry points makes information more findable.
4. Make local political news and information more accessible. This makes politics more approachable and actionable to those not already disposed to follow it.

1. An index of all the facts included in the articles they publish

This means a list of facts, as well as a means to link directly to the part in the article that fact exists.

Example: McDonald’s buys more than 3 billion pounds of potatoes annually across the globe. This nugget of information is more interesting than the article’s headline, McDonald’s seeks better ‘tater for its French fries, yet it was left embedded in the article body for only the most curious to find.

Indexing facts does more than provide new and engaging entry points to existing content. Facilitating easy citations with facts and links to facts can improve the quality of conversations on news-site article comments, and it can also encourage wikipedia users to cite the news site with the tools that make it easy to cite.

2. News archives. Not just from the last month — from the last year, ten years, fifty years, century.

Every local news-dot-com publishing with a newspaper is sitting on a goldmine of archived content. The New York Times hired reCaptcha to help digitize their archives — sure, the NYT’s web strategy doesn’t always align with that of local news-dot-coms, but in this case, they’re onto something.

3. Indexes of news and information by zip code

Denver’s a decently big city. We’ve got 72 neighborhoods and xx zip codes. If there were a place I could go to get all the news, calendar events, and classified listings in my zip code, I would. Not only that, I would tell my neighbors about it. Indexing by zip codes gives a hook for loyal readers to introduce your site to the people that live around them that may not care for your publication, and it gives the non-loyal readers, the non-news junkies a compelling reason to visit.

4. Indexes of information on local politicians, organized by politician.

I don’t care about your catch-all “local politics” category. I care about about the politicians that represent me, and I want an easy way to find out everything they’re doing. That means not just local politicians either — that means the people repping me in the statehouse, my U.S. House representative and my U.S. senator.

Looking at “local” as a catch-all bucket rather than a collection of specific and distinct pieces is a superficial approach to publishing.

The New York Times’ Represent application approaches local politics in a mature and fully fleshed manner.

Here are some examples of catch-all local politics buckets:

• Denver Post: Local Politics
• Boston Herald: Local Politics
• Dallas Morning News: Local Politics

5. Indexes of major crimes, by date, with crime stats aggregated by month, year and every type of location that’s available (county, zip code, neighborhood, street, block etc.).

Yes, this is the type of information you see Everyblock and Adrian Holovaty pushing online. I’m not saying publish data-driven presentations of all crimes — I’m saying start with the big ones, see how that works, and go from there. Publishing per-capita rates for violent crimes opens a window on urban vs. suburban living, on what’s happening in the places we call home and work, and how these incidents trend over time.

I’m going to repeat that: How these incidents trend over time. Crime drives a large part of the news truck, but so often it’s crime without context. Now that local news is online, it has the opportunity to give context to the information it publishes. What would this context do? Turn crime news from the hand-wringing / rubberneck activity and make the crime information actionable. If arson has increased 200% in my zipcode (80204) in the last year, that’s worth asking my police department and local government about.

Reading this followed my discovery of the Kankakee Daily Journal‘s site, which allows comments on the two or three grafs of articles they provide online — the rest of the word-based news is tucked behind the pay e-edition wall.

I’m asking myself: Is PDF-style delivery really the future of newspapers? The e-edition PDFs are attractive to newspapers — they look like the print edition, and they contribute to print-circ numbers. But they also ignore the possibilities of online advertising, which is a glaring problem with many newspaper-dot-coms.

When you hide your information behind a pay-wall or registration-wall, you’re penalizing people’s money or time for access to your stuff.

Charging for your content penalizes all involved in the linking / recommending of that content.

Next, you have these two favorite paragraphs from Berners-Lee’s piece on Net Neutrality:

Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.

Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.

Read the whole article, Net Neutrality: This is serious, here.

1. You’re not afraid to type a URL in the address bar of a web browser.
2. You know what “URL,” “address bar,” and “web browser,” mean.
3. You’ve used a browser that doesn’t have “Explorer,” “MSN,” or “AOL” in its name.
4. You know how to copy and paste a URL (From the page you’re on or from a link on a page) into an email.
5. You know that “http://” goes at the start of every URL.
6. You know how to clear your browser cache without looking up instructions on the internet, and you understand which situations a clear-the-cache can fix.
7. You know how to (and you do) add commonly-used links to your browser link bar (you get half points if you use your browser’s “favorites” in horizontal sidebar).

Check out what he wrote about journalism and the internet, all the way back in 1999:

I do not consider the Internet – and generally the online medium – as a substitute to other media, but as a complement, a new channel of communication which takes its place alongside the others. I am going to position myself here as a journalist and an editor. Because it’s my original profession. Because it’s also the profession I am trying to re-invent (or more accurately, to learn again from scratch) since I have been doing it online. And mostly, because I firmly believe that journalists have an essential role to play in tomorrow’s interactive society and that they are quite wrong in fearing to become obsolete with the advance of the new media.

And this set of bullet points about things today’s journalists will have to deal with:

1. The behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search.
2. Geography is no longer an issue.
3. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots.
4. We will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
5. We will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques.
6. We are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today – the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard.

Read the article, A New Media Tells Different Stories, here.

Yesterday Flickr announced Flickr Places — new indexes for what looks like just about every place / city / town / state / province / country (but not neighborhood, yet — the Flickr Places URL for Capitol Hill in Denver displays a Salt Lake City … also, zip code works, but doesn’t give you photos for only that zip) in the world. This is the information that’s displayed:

• Thumbnails of interesting and recent photos from that place
• Two featured photographers who take photos from that place
• Flickr Groups that pertain to that place
• Weather from that place
• Popular tags from that place
• One featured photo from that places

It’s a great way to harness all the data flickr members add to photos. The Flickr announcement also has a news peg:

We’ve built an experimental new map view built upon the work of highly trained teams of globe trotting squirrels – sort of like the Magic Donkey* but more rodent-y – whose sole job on the team is to ferret out breaking news (or a nerdy conference, or a wedding, or some other thing that lots of people are photographing) and let us know so we can display it on the new map view.

I’m probably way off here, but this looks like it could be a step to bring Yahoo! Local, Flickr, and Yahoo’s You Witness News closer together. In any case, making more of the data you already have is a productive move.

(In a semi-related note, my friend JJ made Chicago’s most-interesting photo list with this shot of the South Loop. I built his web site, Planck Studios Photography, where he writes about photgraphy, Chicago, and his photos. If you’re looking for an awesome gift with a Chicago angle you ought to take a look at his work… and if you have some suggestion or complaint about his site, hey, let me know.

(via the Map Room)

Much of news aims at the “what’s new” angle, but that’s not always the most informative way to look at what’s happening. Sure, a fire claimed an apartment building and two lives yesterday. What does that tell me about the place I live? Besides “tragedy struck,” and “fires happen,” not much. However, that story could also include data on:

• How many people in my city die, on average, every year
• How many people in my city die accidentally, on average, every year
• How many people in my city die in fires, on average, every year
• How many of those people died in apartment fires
• How many apartment fires in my city happen, on average, every year
• How many of those fires destroy the entire apartment building
• What the different causes of those apartment fires were
• If the rate of fires in my city is going up or down
• If the rate of fire deaths in my city is going up or down

What’s the point of that? It puts what happened (the fire) in the bigger picture. It shows the reader where that fire fits in the community picture. If more than one newspaper in more than one city assembles this information then it becomes possible to compare fire deaths and fire rates between cities, which gives additional context, and can raise new questions and give reporters new fodder to evaluate local public services with.

How would this information happen? To deliver context dynamically, that data has to exist in a database. To get there, first, newspapers have to start synthesizing and organizing the news in their archives (ala Adrian Holovaty’s post, A Fundamental Way Newspaper Sites Need to Change). Yes, this won’t happen until newspapers start synthesizing and organizing the news they publish daily, which won’t happen until newspaper-dot-coms get content management systems that address the diversity of the information newspapers publish. No, articles do not cut it, and every day spent on the current article-based model of publishing is another day’s content that misses its potential.

Online newspapers do a shoddy job of connecting like-minded information. The internet opens many possibilities to connect like-minded information. The context that newspapers can build with all the information in their hands is deep and broad. It’s something television news can’t do. Video doesn’t break down in the way that the information in articles do. But it’s something that won’t happen without investing in online and in library staff.

Would this be profitable? Heck if I know. Here’s another question: What kind of news-gathering operation can current online revenues on their own support? There is a somewhat urgent need for product in the online news world: something that’s more than what we’re doing now, something that we can do on a regular basis, and something that builds on itself. There’s gold waiting to be mined in newspaper archives, and that gold isn’t in per-article sales. It’s in the information, names, photos, ads, illustrations, events, businesses — the life and times of a town. This is information nobody else has, and it’s time to start doing something with it.

I can’t say I know for sure that newspaper-dot-coms aren’t moving fast enough, but it sure feels that way. And judging by all the shovelware out there…

Anyway, here are my thoughts on what newspapers need to do to make some progress on the internet:

• Break the addiction to the article as the main model of information distribution.
• Figure out ways to build community that don’t involve message boards, blog / story comments, online polls and community photo galleries.
• Start breaking down and organizing all their information in ways that matter to people (geographically is one good place to start).
• Newsrooms need to break their desperate grasp on the daily news cycle if they want room for meaningful change to take root.
• Deploy online advertising models that are flexible enough that every business in your circulation area could (and would want to) buy an ad.
• Too much time of night producers on online news staffs is spent recreating, reformatting, and re-associating content. Most of that is work that could and should be done by computers — I say get the robots doing the things the robots should be doing, and humans doing the things humans should be doing.

Vernor Vinge’s notion of the “programmer archaeologist” really is about discovering what’s already out there, and placing it into valuable context. The mashup, the journalist-blogger and the participative website are aligned with this concept; the traditional requirements-driven “software engineer” and the traditional newspaper journalist are not.

Yelvington seems to be focusing on what happens when programmers put a halt to their ego and start using tools already out there. Another question worth asking is “What kind of newspaper would happen if journalists could only use the information that had already been published?”

The actual paper would be much thinner, sure. But I can see reporters diving into old content and figuring out new ways to piece together existing information — basically, adding more context to the news. More on this later…