Newsless.org

OK, the mention wasn’t directly referencing my fellowship project, but Marissa Mayer reiterated her recommendation that news stories become much more like Wikipedia entries.¹ Here’s what she said:

The living story

The Web by definition changes and updates constantly throughout the day.  Because of its ability to operate in real-time, it offers an opportunity for news publishers to publish on changing and evolving stories as they happen. Web addresses (known as URLs — uniform resource locators such as http://www.google.com) were designed to refer to unique pieces of content, and those URLs were intended to persist over time. Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL. The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results.

Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

You can read her full testimony at the PDF linked to here. Thanks to my co-blogger for pointing out the snippet.

The WSJ’s Digits blog brings up this criticism of the idea from unnamed publishers:

It will be interesting to see how newspapers react to this idea. Some publishers whom Google has spoken to about it worry that lumping together different stories would require a lot of development work without much pay-off, according to these people. It could also require changes to its reporting and editing process, they say, adding that most readers come to their sites to read a particular article about a certain piece of news, not to browse a topic.

First off, I have to point out that “most readers” don’t have the option of browsing topics on most news sites, so it’s hard to extrapolate about what they might do if given the option. (And I suspect it’s not much better to extrapolate from one case, if you’re looking at the example of Times Topics.) To the former criticism, I think I now have enough experience with a complex topic to make a strong argument that the workflow changes and effort required to start doing this are not all that huge.

1. Previously on Newsless. [↩]

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