Get rid of articles and stories, follow topics
March 16th, 2010We can all agree that the article is dead – what needs to take its place is Topics.
Allow users to build a profile of the news they care about. In the same way we choose twitter followers we could choose news topics. These would be broadly specific, e.g. Haiti Earthquake, War in Iraq, March Madness etc…
Each topic would remember the last time you logged in and quickly summarize the news since then. In addition, it would have a wikipedia-like entry (only through in a lot more graphics and interactivity) to summarize the entire event.
Naturally this is a gross simplification of the solution. The elegantly titled Read State Problemhasn’t been solved, and the level to which we can allow the community to edit would have to be determined.
I’m extremely excited by this site and the awareness that’s been generated around this concept. I’ve been working (read:mulling) on this very idea framed differently for several months now and just haven’t had the time to pull it all together into one post.
If people were to identify and follow topics on their own, would someone ever follow things like the Iraq War (unless you had family there), and would issues important to society and democracy ever be given the attention they warrant?
“If news is that important, it will find me.” (or however that quote goes)
I for one think that this idea that people need to be forced to eat wheaties of hard news is hardly necessary. They never really have, and they never really will. IMHO.
I imagine that Topics like the Iraq War will be followed by the same people who have been following it now: politicians and their associates, news junkies, families of soldiers, soldiers themselves, defense businesses, financial industry, etc…
In short, I don’t think it’s much of a problem.
The best way to follow some topics is on Twitter, which because of its very nature provided the best coverage of the earthquake in Haiti then and now. I still follow that story on Twitter, which is the only way to get the ongoing saga now that most of the media (except for CNN and some NGOs) have moved on.
On the other hand, articles are important and always will be, I think. A long-form article presents a reader with an aggregation of fact and context and point of view and if well-written can force the reader to confront this aggregation, one which he/she may not have assembled on his/her own. Why? Because people are drawn to content that confirms their world view. If inquirers assemble their own aggregations only, the results will be digital collages/scrapbooks. Useful and handy, but not as a substitute for what journalism at its best does now. We are already confronting the problem of silos. Digital scrapbooking would be different architecture, but silo still.
Damn (excuse me), finding your own thoughts written down by another person is … amazing.
I just did a search for “follow topics” on google to see what sites and information about this concept already exist, and well, found your post.
I’m “researching” this concept because just yesterday I decided to make “follow topics” the next feature I’d like to add to my app http://spreadnotes.me.
Sorry if this is going to sound like shameless self-promotion now, but this is really about your post.
In January I started building and using that mentioned app for taking all kinds of notes for myself, like for planning trips and purchase decisions, brain storming, collecting ideas for the same app, and just saving interesting links.
I like the short message style of twitter and the overview of multiples messages/tweets it allows you to have. I also saw that most of my notes are actually not longer than tweets.
So I liked to have a tweet-like note application. The problem with twitter is organizing and searching your tweets for reference. That’s way I built my app around the notion of grouping notes into topics.
After having used my app for a while for my private notes, and being a twitter user , I thought it makes sense to allow myself and other people to publish notes, which are displayed in groups of topics.
I just implemented that feature last week.
Here’s one of such public page for my techie twitter account @_ewr: http://spreadnotes.me/_ewr
Anyway, after launching the public page feature I started to wonder that it would make sense if people could follow specific topics I twitter/collect on my spreadnotes page.
Basically the topics you follow will just appear in your spreadnotes account, besides your own private and public notes. Of course there’s gonna be tweaking needed regarding how new notes are displayed etc., but that’s something I’m gonna worry about later.
Well, am I right that this is kind of going in the direction you are talking about?
Gonna check out your other posts now.
Thanks for this post!
Steffen
I’ll need to review the “dead article” piece by J. Jarvis. Based on a good amount of analytics (10+ months worth, tens of thousands of pages and millions of visitors), individual articles still vastly outweigh – w/r/t views and attention – Topic pages. This presumes a narrow definition of article page (can articles contain info to related articles and topics and still be considered just an article page?), and some ground rules around what Mr. Baker’s calling “Topics.”
Jeff is an active part of Daylife which has among the best Topic pages available. I don’t know the numbers they drive to their Sci/Tech Topic, but I do know sites for whom I’ve done work do far less traffic to “channel pages” than to individual articles overall.
because of the usage patterns I’ve seen personally, I sometimes feel Topics (or “topic pages”) are preferred by a much smaller set of readers – like me – who thinks they’re a cool and simple way to get “more immersed” than via a single article alone.
I’m going to check out S. Miller’s spreadnotes.me (http://www.futureofcontext.com/?p=29#comment-34)
In working out contexts – and extrapolating Topics of interest from articles of interest (or articles from topics), another thing we’re doing at trueslant.com to introduce our Contributors, Topics and Members to one another is “Suggestions:” basically, it’s triangulating the author of an article, the Topic(s) this specific article is categorized as, how many other of that – and other – authors’ pieces appear in the same Topic(s) and what external sources they cite frequently (nyt.com; buzzmachine.com; npr.org) and compare that selections the Member makes.
All of this is designed to get closer to Topic-based rather than article-based “following;” so far, uptake and effectiveness have been good.
Here’s a picture of the Topic / Contributor / Source-based Suggestions for Members.
http://imgur.com/ka7Bh.png
@SMCNALLY–
Thanks for your reply. I do think we’ve got miscommunication on what how a Topic page would work. It’s not a collection of articles with associated meta data attached as DayLife does.
A true, built-for-web, topic page is human-readable. It’s not a listing of all relevant content, it’s a curated summary. Photos aren’t added in a sidebar for browsing, they’re deliberately placed next to relevant content. The most recent YouTube video isn’t shown, the best ones are placed in context. Wikipedia isn’t used as the summary source because it’s easy, it’s used as a reference to create a summary that is relevant to the niche that is looking at the topic page.
In short, I think the analytics you’ve looked at have shown that topic pages are infrequently visited because current topic pages suck. Topics, as I can imagine them, don’t exist yet.
That was fast. Joey’s idea went from post to proof-of-concept in a little under a month. None other than the Wall Street Journal is trying out this idea for the topic of jobs (scroll to the bottom of the linked post for a “Follow this topic on Twitter” button). They haven’t gotten rid of the article yet. Give it time, I guess.
Great article, and I completely agree. Topical context is exactly where information needs to be going. Following on the heels of MacArthur Foundation’s research on the way citizens take in and act upon information (Actualizing vs Dutiful Citizen Models) – people now need much more context and are less likely to figure out the context themselves.
I run a Knight Foundation funded community information project, YourPBC.org – and we’ve been planning to do exactly what you’ve talked about here, for local issues. Currently (at the time of this posting) our site mimics a traditional news site. Featured stories, multiple articles, all are very issue-driven, but anyone reading an article updating on an issue, still has no context unless they followed that series of articles from the beginning.
Our new approach will be to have “issue pages” – curated summary information on local issues, giving updates on that issue, background and history. In addition to the continually updated summary info, we will have real-time articles that will be more in depth that “support” the updates in the summary through our “3i System” (inform, inspire, impact)
This way, no matter when you become aware of the issue , you have context – through our summary and 3i system. You can see what is being done (inform), what has been done (inspire) and what you can do (impact!) – and it will always be the most up-to-date information from our nonprofit contributors.
And while one will still be able to access an individual article on our site, it will always be in context (and visually and graphically identified) to the issue the article “serves.”
We’re close to our re-launch, I will keep you informed as to when we launch – I’d love to get your thoughts on how we’re approaching context on our site after our launch. (right now we have no context!)
That’s the approach we’re taking with our Topic pages – a curated summary of an issue (with embedded links to further detail) coupled with a feed of latest updates. The pages also have a spot to provide background detail on an issue’s key people and places.
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.
For a post on Poynter Online today, I took a look at several different ways to provide background and context on the oil spill in the Gulf.
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.
I agree that topics pages – as curated, well-thought-out summaries of information – are critical, and can and should easily supplant articles for a host of types of information.
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.
We are a small web hosting company that utilizes snail mail to verify customer locations. Swift-post.com has made our lives easier by taking this off our hands. – Elton Robinson
Have you ever considered writing an e-book or guest authoring on other sites?
I have a blog based on the same ideas you discuss and would really like
to have you share some stories/information. I know
my readers would appreciate your work. If you are even remotely interested, feel free to
shoot me an e mail.