Communication over instant messenger tend to be continous and casual, with ebbs and flows, rather than discrete conversations. Wikipedia has changed encyclopedias from being static and authored, to dynamic and crowdsourced, with popular pages usually containing references that are correct up the very day of viewing. Facebook claims to be the biggest media company in the world, but instead of long analytical newspieces, it delivers status updates, activity notifications and event requests.
So in this environment, are articles as a news format obsolete? Well, no. But it does seem that there are better building blocks for the future of journalism. When wanting to find out more about a topic, or the day’s headlines, I want more than an article. I want an aggregation of sources about that entity. I want a page which is constantly updating as new information is found. I want to be able to (hold your breath) share it, contribute to it, comment on it. I want it to contain reputable analysis as well as fact.
And although it might seem very unlikely to some, I think newspapers (and magazines) are able to – even are well placed to – be the source of this. Of course we have seen most newspapers create topic pages in order to improve their Google ranking, but they rarely go beyond this to serve readers – by including external sources, social media aggregations, relevant photos and videos, threading for articles so that they build on each other, including an editable summary that stays up to date. And although this sounds like I’m suggesting publishers copy W
ikipedia, I’m not. These topic pages would involve users, but would benefit from curation by the news organisation itself. As Josh Young points out, “most news articles, of course, simply aren’t like entries in an encyclopedia. An article of news—in both senses of the term—is substantially deeper than the facts it contains.”
Whilst writing this, I have found that, as often is the case, Jeff Jarvis has summarized it nicely – news, when it moves beyond the article “treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering.”
We‘ve been considering this for a while, and idio’s platform now has a system for intelligently presenting topic-centric content. As we have been looking at the implications of this, a few points that are worth mentioning jump out.
- The main focus of this evolution in news format is to better serve readers. It presents information in a more consumable format, helping the reader get a better, deeper, and wider view of the topic, much more quickly. And with idio’s personalized element, we are also looking at enhancing the topic based on your preferred sources, floating friend comments and receommendations, and reducing the prominence of stories already read.
- Having a living and breathing topic page also creates a much more marketable entity to promote to readers. Using a data driven approach to news, publishers can easily identify topics that are ‘trending’ in order to give them prominence on the front page, and to set up a specific Twitter account, or to even promote them through PPC advertising. By capturing the transient news readers, the news organisation has an opportunity to provide value and win longer term readers.
- Finally, it increases the value to advertisers, by collecting a tight group of readers with similar interests into one location. Any topic that has commercial value to brands, or that enables transactional opportunities (ticket sales, products etc) can be exploited by the sales team.
It’s worth also mentioning that by delivering a user experience that is topic-based rather than article based, it is much easier to include relevant archive content. Monetising archive content is a key area where most news organisations can generate extra revenue.
So how can a news organisation move from churning out independent chunks of content in the form of articles, to providing topic-based information. Well, firstly it requires you to be ‘open’ – ie willing to deliver coverage from other news sources, social networks, and your own readers. Secondly, it requires that you use a CMS, semantic engine, or manual taxonomy, that classifies your content according to various topics. Thirdly, you need to think about how to deliver this content – whether in topic pages as a section on your current site, or whether you re-orientate your user experience around this method of consumption. More on that in another post…