Next steps?

  • Find one or more news publications that will experiment with the approach
  • Identify journalism students for the experiment
  • Identify principles and practices of the new approach
  • Analyze and report on results

 

 

Issues & outcomes

In no particular order:

- Emphasis on reporting, not writing - Could reduce allure of the job for some, improve the appeal for others. Also requires careful organization of the material. Will it take as long or longer than it takes to write a traditional story? Will the writing process become shorter as reporters gain proficiency with the model?

- Focus on completeness - Could have the effect of highlighting gaps in reporting, putting pressure on reporters to be more thorough.

- Clearly separates facts from analysis, opinion and community comment - will readers perceive this kind of reporting as less biased?

- News? Features? Both? - What kinds of stories lend themselves to this approach? Which do not? Why? Easy to see how a Continuing Coverage of Crime categor could benefit from constant updates, for example.

- News-O-Matic? Does this put a greater (or lesser) burden on readers?

- Better design? Does this approach lend itself to appealing designs that makes it easy for visitors to understand and navigate?

- New paradigm? How does the role of the editor change? Do editors plug the holes in the story? Do they act as coaches or parnters? Do they become aggregators bringing together other elements?

Why put news on a diet?

The consistent message from media critics such as Jeff Jarvis and online experts such Eric Schmidt of Google is that the MSM still write stories that are much too long online. Especially in an era when more young people are getting their news through cellphones, this is a critical issue in developing a sustainable new online news delivery model.

Toward a new model of online news delivery

This experiment attempts to create a template for online news delivery that would achieve four goals:

  • Display news online in a more comprehensible and easy-to-read fashion on computers, cellphones and other devices
  • Provide an easily updatable template that allows first-timers to see the full story as it exists on any given day  
  • Offer archives of previous versions of the template as a record of events over time
  • Separate the straight reporting from analysis, opinion and comment, which may reduce reader complaints about bias

To illustrate the concept, I took a story from The Detroit News published on April 9, 2009. I chose it because it is the kind of story we often see in a major urban newspaper, and it is one that will undoubtedly requre continuing coverage.

The first bullet below is the actual story as it appeared in The Detroit News. The second bullet is the same story revised in the new template. It contains all of the information included in the original story but it has been reduced for easy consumption on a computer or a cellphone. (This version can serve as a template for continuing coverage, by archiving some elements while adding updates over time.) The second experiment explores the possibility of using a color-coded template as a home for continuing coverage.

NOTE: Author comments on the experimental pages are in red.

MONETIZING THE COVERAGE: For an evergreen asset such as the continuing coverage of the Detroit Schools' budget crisis, news organizations might want to identify advertiser who want to buy a year-long sponsorship. Sponsors would recognize that there might not be new copy every day, but that this is a significant story that will likely be of great interest among parents, teachers and school administrator for many months.