In A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change, Adrian Holovaty has some cogent and compelling arguments that newspapers and reporters need to rethink the way they approach news.
One of those important shifts is: Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.
Conditioned by decades of an established style of journalism, newspaper journalists tend to see their primary role thusly:1. Collect information
2. Write a newspaper story
The problem here is that, for many types of news and information, newspaper stories don’t cut it anymore.
So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text — a newspaper story — that has no chance of being repurposed.
Adrian, as close as the new world of journalism has to a whiz kid, isn’t arguing against the well-crafted newspaper story. In the post he outlines what needs to be done to extend the role of the newspaper as information provider: redeveloped content management systems that serve both the story-centric approach and the need to identify and serve structured data in the ways that readers want.
His argument is that, once the heavy lifting of the coding is done, it’s relatively easy for newspapers to store and serve data that can be served up, reused and remixed, by reporters, editors and readers.
The salient point, I think, is that, like much else that connectivity and interaction makes possible, what it will take to remake media isn’t the technology or the programming chops, but a recognition that with new media comes new possibilities, and demands for new approaches and ways of thinking.
TAGS: RETHINKING MEDIA, STRUCTURED DATA, JOURNALISM
[...] Adrian Holvaty writes an excellent piece on how newspapers should be sharing more of their research online and not just continuing with the “gather lots of information and distill it” model. His advice also applies to TV websites. Your reporters gather tons of information that would help your audience understand the story. Post it all. “Repurposing” is just a term for using old stuff. Use the new stuff in a new way.(via notes from a teacher) [...]