Newspapers, Don’t be Story-Centric
Way back in
2006, Adrian Holovaty wrote the following prophetic advice
for journalists:
“Newspapers need to stop the
story-centric worldview.”
On the face of
it, this sounds nonsensical. Isn’t a journalist’s job to collect information
and then write the story? Holovaty explains:
“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.”
He went on to
emphasize that he was not talking
about things like making the article suitable for digital formats because that
would just be “changing the format, not the information itself”.
Rather, he was advising them to focus on the raw data itself. But the typical
journalist reaction to that was:
“Displaying raw data does not help
people; writing a news article does help people, because it's plain English.”
Holovaty was
really asking that the story aside,
the raw data too should be captured
in that newspaper’s database. But that’s not what he found happening:
“Just about every newspaper Web site
content-management system I've ever seen is unabashedly story-centric.”
Instead, he
wanted the aim to be to:
“store information in the most valuable
format possible.”
Here “valuable
format” is one that a software algorithm could crunch some day.
Now let’s fast
forward to present day.
Guess what was
the most-visited
article of 2013 for the New York
Times? It was not a story; it was
an interactive titled “How
Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk” (it’s a quiz on the dialect across the US)
based on an actual story! To add insult to injury, this derivative was
published on 21 December: (pause to see what that means) a derivative that was online for just 11 days of 2013 generated more visits than any other piece,
including stories!
And it only gets
worse: the article that was 6th on the list, The
Scientific 7-Minute Workout, was converted into an iPhone app. And
guess who gets the ad revenue from that app? Not the New York Times. To put it differently, not converting the article
into an app cost the New York Times money.
I guess that was
the “problem of lost opportunity” that Holovaty was trying to explain to the
journalism industry in 2006.
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