There’s been some talk on the web about the failings of the article as the main way newspaper-dot-coms deliver information. There’s been some good talk about all the other things you can do with information than put it in a big blob of text.

Here are a few common instances where articles aren’t enough.

• Reviews. Music, restaurant, book, video game. Put ‘em in a database, don’t let that information go down the article-hole.
• Any type of Q&A-style column.
• Letters to the editor.
• The sports agate / stats.
• Profiles.
• Calendar listings (are newspaper-dot-coms still doing this? Yes, yes they are).
• Any type of story that runs in print on a regular or semi-regular basis.

If you’re interested in more reading on what more you can do with the information in articles, check out my “Structured Data” link-library on furl.net.

This is what they write:

What we experienced in 2006 was just a first round in wild independent journalism. The newspaper will learn to integrate their readers and act as filters with the help of their readership. That they have not figured out yet how to do that is nothing else but pathetic. Wasn’t the reader’s opinion section always the most read section of a newspaper (at least in Switzerland that is the case). The first Newspaper that manages to integrate key readers as democratic representatives of their readership, while building up a in interactive base concept in how they generate and structure content – will rule the online landscape of newspapers.

Newspapers are still far easier to read than online information. Imagine what the New York Times could be if it leveraged the intelligence of its readership. Imagine how that paper would sell.

I guess it’s a good thing that newspapers made some non-journalism web-oriented top-10 list. The prediction itself is reasonable. Information when done right is flexible, and right now most newspaper-dot-coms have a real inflexible approach to their information. Considering how much info passes through a newspaper every day, that’s a darn damn shame.

» Read the post here

(via GlobalNerdy)

• A quote from some newsmaker,
• A photo-thumbnail index of the top people in the news,
• A photo-thumbnail index of the top organizations in the news,
• A photo-thumbnail index of the top places in the news,
• And a top-story list (with a little more context to the information than most top-story lists provide).

For reference, DayLife defines “top” as “The stories appearing most often in the world’s top news publications.”

I’m working at my job to get more types of content than “stories” indexed and dynamically displayed on our site. The further newspaper-dot-coms move from the article as the main delivery mode of information, the more exciting the online product gets.

(Via CraigBlog)

I was reading Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture, which breaks it down like this: online information is changing from a thing that designers and information architects organized to a thing that the users (people) organize. And I thought, “Man, newspapers haven’t even made it to the architect-defined model.” Most newspapers still follow the information design of their printed product, which is seems to be a problem with getting comfortable and lacking-of-imagination. Most newspapers have yet to meaningfully engage their online community, much less organize information base on their community’s interests. I would say the time is now, but heck that’s probably been said off and on for the past six years.

So, what happens when industries take their time getting up to speed with the internet? Well, it depends on how acute the competition is. Which depends on how profitable and visible the industry is.

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…