Future of news
David Weinberger boswells a chunky discussion of the future of news at Foocamp.
Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com is interested in optimizing information collection. How do we get journalists to collect information in ways that machines can reuse it. Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information, he says. . . . Adrian says that the categorization onus should be on the reporter. All the info in it ought to be categorized so, if it’s a report on a mayor’s speech, we can see all the speeches by the mayor, all speeches about the same topic, etc.
Tag that.
Tags: journalism, tags
August 28th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
I’ll tag this one with “duh”.
August 28th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
That is very logical. It makes perfect sense to categorize information. I wonder why it has taken so long for somebody to make a big deal about it.
August 28th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
While tags or categories supplied at the time of publication are useful, they are not sufficient. The publisher is often not aware of (or even interested in) all the potential uses of the published material. Moreover, over time, new categories constantly emerge.
What is needed is a mechanism that can expeditiously, reliably and accurately categorize content *after* it has been published. And, to be really useful, the categories must be theme-based categories (rather than broad ‘national’, ‘international’, ’sports’, etc.) where the themes persist over a decent period of time.
This is the true ‘Holy Grail’.
PS: I wouldn’t characterize Wikipedia as a “framework desperate for information.” I’d say precisely the opposite - term-based indexing is not, IMHO, much of a framework per se.
August 28th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Adrian is right, of course. Interestingly, good newspaper libraries — back in the day — were categorized just like that. You could pull a file and read the about the mayor’s speeches and pull another file and read the about speeches on the same topic. Of course, they weren’t open to the public. D’oh!
With the benefit of hindsight, we newspaper people are realizing that we’ve done many things that haven’t been in the best interests of the public we’ve tried to serve. I hope we’re learning.
August 28th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
tags are crap. I tried to get analysts to do it, and it didn’t work (good luck with reporters). The reasons are that “your taxonomy isn’t my taxonomy” and it requires a discipline that most people don’t naturally have.
The only way to really do it is to:
1) get people to write detailed posts.
2) Build prefabed searches on critical keyword combos
3) Turn those news searches into RSS (you can do this on Google News now)
4) Create a synthetic RSS stream that combines multiple RSS feeds centered around a topic of interest
5) If you really want to get fancy, create a tool that autogenerates combinations of search based RSS into a custom synthetic RSS feeds for different topics of interest
All of this is simple tech. It is also doable and perfect for a fast-paced news room.
August 28th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Not surprising that others who use the tools that Adrian was instrumental in creating come to the same conclusions. We’re not using all of this capability on TexasGigs yet, but when Pegasus News (finally) launches in November, we’re databasing everything local we can get our hands on — and reporters/editors/aggregators will meta- and geo- tag every piece of content.
Our experience on a local site is that 75% of traffic is data and 25% is narrative. Yet I imagine that most newspapers spend in inverse proportion.
Don’t get me wrong– I Love narrative. Storytelling is why I got into this business. But our best stories are digital fishwrap in a day unless they get “databased.” It is a verb: “To transform a piece of information that is useful for a moment into something that is useful for ever.” That should be the motto of all news AND information organizations.
Here’s the gazillion dollar question: Which will draw more eyeballs, engagement, comment and therefore advertising?– A three graf story on the City Council meeting wedged onto page 3 of Metro or an exhaustively-linked rundown on the night’s votes, who cast them, and who supported their campaigns? (Substitute nonprofit charity event, soccer game, concert or anything else you like for the council meeting.)
Ideally you have all of the above. But in a world of tough choices, I’ll bet on the data every time. If you provide it in a usable format, the “former audience” will provide plenty of commentary. If you don’t, they’re not likely to spend a lot of time volunteering their services as unpaid “citizen journalists” to prop up your business model.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:07 am
[...] Jeff Jarvis started an interesting discussion on how to categorize and tag news. Some of the comments he received are interesting: [...]
August 31st, 2006 at 6:38 pm
[...] Good link from Jarvis, who quotes the FooCamp discussion on the future of news. Speaking of the Wik: "Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information," says Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com. [...]