BuzzMachine

From: Farhad Manjoo
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/05/business_insider_a_terrific_news_source_.html

…When there’s fast-breaking business news like the Facebook IPO, BI’s model is hard to beat. Old-school journalists are sometimes a territorial bunch, reluctant to credit one another’s scoops. For instance, if you only read Wednesday morning’s lead Wall Street Journal story on Facebook’s IPO struggles, you wouldn’t have seen any mention of all the stuff Reuters had uncovered on Tuesday.
But Henry Blodget don’t care—he’s happy to consider scoops from all sides. In stories with lots of moving parts, BI’s quick aggregation is an asset—you can read everything from everywhere in one place, and Blodget and his deputies add much-needed context and perspective to the otherwise jargony onslaught of developments. And then, in addition to hard news, they’ll give you a sense of the emotions on the street—for instance, they’ll let you hear from theanonymous hedge fund manager who’s enraged about the IPO.
If BI’s only virtue was aggregation, it wouldn’t be very different from Drudge or the Huffington Post’s business section. Where Blodget—and his indefatigable staff, especially Joe Weisenthal and Nicholas Carlson—really shine is in the way they add their own sourcing and quick, sharp analysis to developing stories.* I don’t always agree with their perspectives (especially as they’re distilled in over-the-top headlines), but I always admire the way BI tries to place all news it encounters into a larger storyline….

My obsession with the wiki platform (specifically, MediaWiki) is with its flexibility in creating and managing simultaneous taxonomies, on the fly. Frankly, pretty much everything you say that is needed can be done in MediaWiki. Journalists won’t figure this out. Librarians can.

I wrote this post in 2009 about what to learn from Wikipedia regarding coverage of a major breaking story: http://www.rexblog.com/2009/09/30/20010

Jay Rosen is my go-to guru on this topic: He’s certainly written more than anyone I follow on the concept of contextual content. (I use the terms “flow content” and “contextual content” to separate that which flows over us constantly vs. that which provides us background and facts and related, ever-green information. But I’m also like Rafat – I hate the word content.)

Here’s a post I wrote about a panel Jay was on at SXSW 2010 in which the concept of contextual content was explore:

http://www.rexblog.com/2010/03/24/20644

Fantastic post Jeff of a longstanding idea – but never summarized this succinctly.

Jeff: Fascinating discussion, which I’m joining late … and with a certain amount of chagrin over the fact that neither your post nor the many sharp comments contains a single mention of Times Topics, where we provide fully curated backgrounders on 2,500 top-of-the-news subjects, updated in real time for major events, plus lists of resources and highlights from the archives (on some). (On today’s home page news, see Syria http://nyti.ms/KOceV0 or Ahmed Shafik, http://nyti.ms/KmHWI2 or the Volcker Rule http://nyti.ms/M27UEN, which deals with market making. We’re also experimenting with ways to improve our 25,000 topic long tail, with a module that pulls in summaries from the Times Index on major stories, like Ben Bernake http://nyti.ms/JKLcAv — and of course, there are plenty of other ideas for that mythical CMS! If you do get a session together, I’d be happy swap notions.

I don’t know about this, Jeff. I don’t think assets and paths really get at the core of the issue.

Before you even start reading something, the first question you subconsciously ask is: should I care about this, is this something for me? Most people never come into contact with stories they don’t understand, because it’s easier to just skip over headlines that look weird.

The Facebook IPO bypassed a lot of people’s natural reflex to not read things we think we won’t understand, because (1) people are interested in Facebook in general and (2) the media has been hyping up this thing to no end without really considering whether it’s actually an important topic for a mainstream audience, leading people to consider reading a business story they otherwise simply wouldn’t touch.

But, okay, let’s continue the journey: people click through to the story. They see stuff they don’t understand. Terminology. What went before. Context. Why it matters. Ouch. Definitely, let’s try to find ways to fix that that don’t annoy readers that are more experienced with the subject.

At the same time, we’ll have to find a way to make people comfortable with the fact that we’re essentially presenting them with “hey, here’s the 10-step, 45-minute process you need to go through to understand this story.” I’m at work, on my lunch break, and I don’t even care about business journalism all that much, so bugger off.

But once we’ve solved the background knowledge problem *and* found a way to get people onto the page and keep them on it without them getting overwhelmed and fleeing, once we do all that, we will find that there’s a second and equally large stumbling block: different audiences care about the same topics for different reasons, and need a story that aligns with their perspective for things to really click.

Take the Nieman Lab for example, or your blog or mine. There’s no way to intelligently chunk up that content (whether or not it’s mixed up with external sources) to suit both people who have never heard about the challenges of digital media and those that have. These articles and posts are written from a certain perspective with a certain audience in mind, and that perspective is part of the writing, the individual asset, not something you can change by creating a different path through chunks of content. Unless you turn the path itself into a bonafide piece of content. In which case you’ve just created a well-researched story with links, not used the hyperlink to create a new story form.

The idea of treating stories like assets and paths only really comes to life in a scenario where the same pool of assets could be used in many different paths. While I can see some of that happening (it does already), my gut feeling is that to really serve our users well, it takes more than a custom path, it takes tailored assets too. There’s overlap and there are opportunities to avoid duplicated efforts, I’m just not sure the potential wins are huge.

Also, I wonder whether people really get as annoyed by background paragraphs as you fear they do. I just read a story somewhere that explained to me that CPM, in the context of advertising, stands for cost per mille. Does that bother me? No. I glance over it and go to the next paragraph. In fact, repeating obvious and well-known information is a literary device that’s often used in non-fiction, to establish a shared world before diving into the deep. It gets annoying if there’s a ton of that stuff, but in that case, I should have probably skipped the whole thing anyway.

Lastly, consider that the idea of assets and paths is what defines Delicious stacks, Bitly bundles and MentorMob playlists. I’d be interested to hear how you would move beyond those forms towards something that can really be a reinvention of the article.

It’s a really complex problem.

What does excite me is the fact that we’re thinking about this at all – and Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson have written excellent posts about “the future of context” that date back as far as two years ago, to which we can now add your contribution.

As you rightly point out, who cares if the post-article is something of a kludge and imperfect. The only thing that really matters is whether it’s better than what we have right now. It can’t be hard to beat the article.