Jul 26 2011
The new structure of stories: a reading list
Different medium, different story form. It’s clear that each new technology — photography, radio, television — has brought with it different ways of constructing a narrative, and different ways those narratives fit into the audience’s lives. Online media are no different, and the step between analog and digital is in many ways much larger than any that has come before, because the internet connects the audience to each other as well as to the newsroom.
Here’s my attempt at a little reading list of recent work on the structure of stories. Pointers to additional material are welcome!
The Big Picture
What’s wrong with the article, anyway? Jeff Jarvis explores this question in “The article as luxury or by-product.” This essay provoked lots of interesting reaction, such as from Mathew Ingram.
So how do we understand ways to fix this? Vadim Lavrusik takes a shot at this question and comes up with the building blocks of context, social, personalization, mobile, participation. It’s a good taxonomy so I’m going to partially steal it for this post.
At the NYC Hacks Hackers meetup last week, Trei Brundrett took us through SB Nation’s “story stream” product, and Gideon Lichfield of The Economist gave a really nice run through of the “news thing” concept that was fleshed-out collaboratively last month at Spark Camp by Gideon, Matt Thompson, and a room full of others. Very meaty, detailed, up-to-the-minute discussions, for serious news nerds. Video here.
Context
You just can’t do better than Matt Thompson’s “An antidote for web overload.” I also recommend Matt’s wonderful “The three key parts of news stories that are usually missing.” Another good primer is Jay Rosen’s “Future of Context” talk at SXSW.
See also my “Short doesn’t mean shallow,” about hyperlinks as a contextual storytelling form.
For an example of these ideas in action, consider Mother Jone’s Egypt Explainer page — which Gideon Lichfield critiques in the video linked above.
Social
What does it mean for news to be social anyway? Henry Jenkins argues for the power of “spreadable media” as a new distribution model.
In “What’s the point of social news?” I discuss two areas where social media have a huge impact on news: the use of social networks as a personalized filter, and distributed sourcing of tips and material.
Personalization
News is now personalized by a variety of filters, both social and algorithmic. Eli Pariser argues this puts us in a “filter bubble.” He may be right, but research by Pew and others [1,2] consistently shows that when users are allowed to recommend any URL to one other, the “news agenda” that the audience constructs has only 5%-30% of stories in common with mainstream media.
A comparison of questions asked of the White House by a Twitter audience vs. by journalists shows a remarkable difference in focus. All of this this suggests to me that whatever else is happening, personalization meets an audience need that traditional broadcast journalism does not.
Besides, maybe not every person needs to see every story, if we view the goal of journalism as empowerment.
Participation
What do we know and what don’t we know about public participation in the journalism project, and what has worked or failed so far? Jay Rosen has an invaluable summary.
I also recommend the work of Amanda Michel as someone who does crowd-based reporting every day, and my own speculations on distributed investigative reporting.
Structured information
Is the product of journalism narratives or (potentially machine-readable) facts? Adrian Holovaty seems to be the first to have explored this in his 2006 essay “A fundamental way newspaper websites need to change.” This mantle has been more recently taken up by Stijn Debrouwere in his “Information Architecture for News Websites” series, and in Reg Chua’s “structured journalism,” and in a wide-ranging series at Xark.
There are close connections here to semantic web efforts, and occasional overlap between the semweb and journalism communities.
Mobile
I haven’t seen any truly good roundup posts on what mobile will mean for news story form, but there are some bits and pieces. Mobile is by-definition location aware, and Mathew Ingram examines how location is well used by Google News (and not by newsrooms.)
Meanwhile, Zach Seward of the Wall Street Journal has done some interesting news-related things with Foursquare.
Real time
Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian and now at Columbia, explains why every news organization needs to be real-time.
For a granular look at how informations spreads in real time, consider Mathew Ingram on “Osama bin Laden and the new ecosystem of news.” For a case study of real-time mobile reporting, we have Brian Stelter’s “What I learned in Joplin.”
It’s not recent, but lately I keep going to back to another 2008 Jeff Jarvis article titled “The building block of journalism is no longer the article”
– http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/09/30/the-building-block-of-journalism-is-no-longer-the-article/
Chris K.
Wow! Your link to “Short doesn’t mean shallow,” is broken, it points to some wp-admin thing
Regarding the rest of your article; I’ll have to come back after I’ve read up! To help me read them I added them to a delicious feed for convenience: http://www.delicious.com/mogsie/journalism My journalism tag had a few old gems too, mostly about the downfall of paper based news media, like this classic from Clay Shirky:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
Erik — fixed the link, thanks. And I love that Shirky piece too, but it didn’t feel like it was directly about story form.
[...] ABSOLUTAMENTE indispensável: The new structure of stories: a reading list. [...]
[...] Maybe somewhere there is a newspaper or web designer who is thinking about a new kind of site that can incorporate these kind of real-time elements. I hope so, because the way that most news sites function has to change if it’s going to adapt to the way that the news works now — instead of trying to patch and tweak a decades-old publishing model. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more links about the evolution of the news story, Associated Press editor Jonathan Stray had a great roundup in a recent post. [...]
[...] Maybe somewhere there is a newspaper or web designer who is thinking about a new kind of site that can incorporate these kind of real-time elements. I hope so, because the way that most news sites function has to change if it’s going to adapt to the way that the news works now — instead of trying to patch and tweak a decades-old publishing model. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more links about the evolution of the news story, Associated Press editor Jonathan Stray had a great roundup in a recent post[16]. [...]
[...] job of summarizing the recent conversation about the changing structure of news stories with a fantastic reading list. Now that you’re done with this link-fest, be sure to give that one a look-through, too. [...]
Here’s my contribution to the discussion, published last year. “News is not a story“
[...] The new structure of stories: a reading list [...]
[...] The new structure of stories: a reading list — Jonathan Stray [...]
[...] Es fällt mir schwer, das zu schreiben, aber ärgerlicherweise hat Jeff Jarvis vermutlich mal wieder Recht. Der Artikel als journalistische Form ist heftig gealtert und sieht im Netzzeitalter allmählich auch so aus. (Eine hervorragende Leseliste mit vielem Bedenkenswerten zu dieser Debatte hat Jonathan Stray zusamme….) [...]
[...] of media has its wrinkles. Just as magazine design is different from newspaper design, so too is website design different from design for mobile devices. The rise of cellphones and tablets as news outlets has influenced designers and editors alike. [...]
[...] important parts of articles now are leaning more toward participation, the ability to go mobile and to deliver news in real [...]
[...] pithy stories that appeal only to certain audience may be to their advantage: Many people now personalize the news they read, meaning they streamline what they read online and only seek out what interests them. [...]
[...] are so many important things to consider when analyzing how this frontier is affecting journalistic publications. Both Sports [...]
[...] news format, as more and more news organizations turn to social media to actively engage readers. Johnathan Stray points out that this different medium – online – calls for a different story form. [...]
[...] idea that posting online is becoming the original form that news will be posted in, is leading some to question the format of the traditional news article. Journalists should realize that the [...]
[...] course, with the addition of new technology, news story structures have changed as well. There are so many components that go into an article now, from [...]
good post…