February 26th, 2006

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Reinventing news for a search-based world

Sunday, February 26th, 2006

On OJR, Robert Niles has a fascinating suggestion for completely rethinking online news: replace inverted-pyramid newspaper articles with staff-written wikis. (For which he suggests the delightful nickname “stikis.” You heard it here first, dear reader.) Why? To attract search-engine traffic.

I’m suggesting that — instead of distinct daily takes — news stories could be covered with encyclopedia-style articles that staffers would update with new information whenever available. How many more inbound links would such an approach get?

Inbound links, of course, being the current currency of the search-driven Web.

I see two obvious problems with the suggestion:

1) the writing required would be so different from that used in the print product that editorial resources would be taxed, and
2) the lede would be perpetually buried; that is, readers would have trouble figuring out what parts of the news are new.

Though the second problem might be avoided with constant rewriting and clever formatting, my hunch is that self-contained news stories will remain the dominant delivery device for news. They’re simply easier to pluck relevant details out of. This isn’t to say that local papers couldn’t launch parallel stiki or wiki services for their coverage area. But I doubt extensive stikis are likely to be worth their while.

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Using tags in local newspaper archives

Sunday, February 26th, 2006

How can small papers get the most out of their archives? Folksonomy is sexy, but most Web audiences are too small for it to work well. However, old-fashioned, top-down tags can be a useful tool for the many local papers that, like many Web newcomers, still sort their Web content with print principles in mind.

(Yes, Washingtonpost.com has added del.icio.us links to all its stories. Yes, this is a terrific promotional move for a national paper. No, it’s doesn’t add as much to local papers, because they aren’t looking for national readers. But yes, local papers ought to consider offering it merely as a service to readers.)

But here’s something more important that small papers could easily do with minimal staff effort: make a list of a couple dozen possible “tags” for stories. When any story is sent to the Web, a staffer can glance over the list of tags and check any that apply.

A newspaper in North Carolina might write frequently about the pork industry. Does the print edition have a section entirely for the pork industry? Of course not. And as a result, the paper’s Web site doesn’t, either. But it should! A small set of staff-written tags are easy ways to build topical archives — whose index pages (available in RSS, of course) can then be used to cluster non-news content for the target audience, such as topical blogs, off-site links, and of course targeted ads.

What’s more, a tag system, unlike a print-style tree categorization, lets stories fall into multiple categories. And it can be used to easily locate similar articles, which have similar combinations of tags.

Readers should be able to navigate newspaper Web sites in various ways: search, vertical brosing (feature section->movies page->Brokeback Mountain review), and horizontal browsing (Brokeback Mountain review->Oscar preview). A staff-maintained tag system is one way to facilitate that.

Posted in archives, things we should do better, tips | No Responses »