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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