For example, imagine a comprehensive stock market report or sports story that’s micro-tagged to within an inch of its life; it’s still not as useful as a table of stocks or a box score. That’s not to say the stories are useful; only that the tables, by virtue of layout and structure, also have value.

A lot of the discussion about search, and information, is centered around text (and to some extent images) in the narrative form and how to make it more contextual or searchable, etc; that’s important, but so too is thinking about the form of that text, and whether it should be captured more in tabular or other data structures, ala Politifact.

I muse more on this at my blog, structureofnews.wordpress.com

The real problem is that they can be – with the exception of Wikipedia – very costly to produce in any kind of real-time if we want them to be any good. One thing I’m trying to address on my blog is how we can mechanize some parts of this, by restructuring the process of journalism, the way that Politifact (www.politifact.com) did very effectively for fact-checking statements of politicians.

That’s not a perfect solution, but it’s relatively cost-effective, and continually updated – what we want any topics page to be.

Ikaika Hussey
Publisher, The Hawaii Independendent

Even verbal quotes we aren’t supposed to take TOO badly out of context. If a candidate in a tight race went home at the end of a very long night saying to the local reporter “ok, that’s it, I’m gone,” it would be very irresponsible of the reporter to publish a headline that said “candidate in tight race:”I’m gone!”"

So in short, it’s not verbal vs. visual, it’s minimal context necessary to establish meaning.

Topic pages are an option, though they’re limited for such a complex story. I agree with Ryan that it’s really important to include a curated summary, which acts as a gentle introduction to the story. The summary on NYT’s topic page on the spill is set up mostly as a chronology of how the news unfolded. I think users would find it more useful to read a summary organized around topics (which is why I thought ProPublica’s Q&A was a good guide to the key issues.)

I tried Google’s “Living Stories” plugin for WordPress to see how it would work for this purpose. It’s buggy and not ready for use in a newsroom, but it does let you divide the coverage into “themes,” which users can use to filter the stories listed on the topic page. I think the inclusion of these themes is one of the main contributions of the Living Stories approach. Themes (and other ways of personalizing the presentation) make a topic page useful not only for the uninitiated user, but the informed person who wants to investigate a particular issue.

Our purpose in creating them is the same as yours – we have no idea WHEN a new reader moved to town or otherwise decided to start paying attention to a local issue. So summarizing important local topics this way is a valuable act of journalism. These are the pages where you can get caught up, and then stay caught up.

They’re simple, straightforward pages, but this is one of my favorite things we’ve done in quite a while. I’m not sure you can truly *replace* the article with a topic page, though — I think the two pieces have a harmonious relationship. Because our stories are automatically aware of any Topic page they belong to, regardless of how you’re coming into the story, that background is available. For example:

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/apr/21/charge-stands-in-zehm-case/

http://www.spokesman.com/topics/otto-zehm/

I certainly would like to wire in notifications, though, so interested readers can more efficiently follow topics, like you describe.