There’s too much news on the web; and way too little explanation.
Truth
What kind of life do you have if you’re always breaking news, but never fixing it?
discuss amongst yourselves.
There’s too much news on the web; and way too little explanation.
“tightly-written news, views and stuff.” a new favorite.
$3.42 vs 10 cents. The Times is monetizing its time on site 34 times better than Facebook.
definitely click-through to this. social networks are blowing news sites out of the water in terms of time spent on site but, it seems, aren’t doing a fantastic job monetizing it.
I’m expecting chaos, but as the front pages of our sites become ever more professional, it’s even more important to allow anarchy to bubble up from below. The goal is to blur the line between our editors and commenter-contributors. News and discussion have been so segregated on the web. You think of the 1990s era discussion forum software. Really hasn’t changed. Maybe we should think of journalists as the instigators and moderators of discussion. News follows from discussion as much as discussion follows from news. Successful sites — and useful publishing software platforms — will bring the two together so they can feed off each other.
Nick Denton, Got a #tip? Gawker opens tag pages to masses. (via soupsoup) (via wearethedigitalkids)
that 2nd to last sentence is the most important one to understand.
And too often, we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed. “What happened today?” is replaced with “Who won today?” The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters. We fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should –- and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation. We seem stuck with a choice between what cuts to our bottom line and what harms us as a society. Which price is higher to pay? Which cost is harder to bear?
But the Internet did something else to the news. By putting everyone on a 120MPH highway, it left very little room for value judgment and discretion around what is or isn’t worth talking about.
It was from an automated Twitter account called NPRbackstory, a project by a man named Keith Hopper. Keith is a project manager at Public Interactive, a division of NPR, and NPRbackstory is an intriguing experiment in getting value out of one of the most overlooked assets any established news organization has: its archives.
i’ll write about this more, in-depth, on OTD this week. however, in the meantime (via andy), it’s significant enough to mention today. seems like NPR read matt’s post on news & context.
I’m not arguing that news organizations should create repositories of useless topics in the hope that one day some calamity will make those topics relevant. I’m saying journalists should ask themselves what’s most important for their communities to know, and cover it diligently. Not with the expectation that the coverage will draw an instant wave of traffic, but with the understanding that if it’s truly important, it will spark enough relevant news to draw a significant audience over time. And the more of that context we lay out, the more relevant we can be at any given moment. This is how we’ll begin to build relationships that matter with our communities.
preach it, brother.
phew.
i’m sure i’ll move stuff around but it’s not anything i hadn’t been planning to do for months now. i’m using rudder to watch the mattress and mint to watch (almost) everything else.
besides, i feel like we’re in an old tom & jerry cartoon.
