Discussion points for a better news experience

In The Golden Age of Newsprint Collides With the Gilt Age of Internet News, Elizabeth Churchill comments on the newspaper industry and some of its problems. She also raises some interesting questions and suggestions about what she would like to see in improved news websites.

Here are some of those items from the article that I found particularly interesting, along with just a few thoughts.

2. Let’s think about how to do a better job of recommending “related” stories. Many search engines reveal items that are generally popular – that are highly ranked. Certainly we should design better filters, but we should also design better automatic information sniffers and surfacers that seek out stories of interest. Can we design better relational models so we can surface relationships between stories that are actually meaningful instead of the “also see” hyperlink that takes me to a story from five years ago that somehow got linked to the current one? Can we do a better job of making explicit the relationship between events at the local, national, and global levels? Can we design better tools for following story developments over time – even those stories that have non-sensational endings?

A lot of smart companies are working in that space. (At Sphere, we are providing related-content solutions, too.) I am also spending lots of my personal time thinking about this lately.

Related content is an area of increasing importance and the computational methods are likewise becoming more sophisticated, as research and understanding progresses.

News is becoming more personal, too, for better or worse. It is entirely possible to customize news in a way to only focus on certain types of news (local, sports, etc.) and ignore others. We may well start seeing something similar for related content suggestions. If a website understands a user’s preferences, they can be used to make decisions regarding related content. These preferences would not just be in terms of freshness vs. authority, but also preferences regarding topics/aspects of interest. Given a popular news item involving a person, their Web company and favorite vacation spot, is the user interested in the person, their company, other companies like it, that vacation spot, similar spots, a combination of some of those, etc.?

In this case, users should ideally be able to see, how the site arrived at their related content suggestions and alter those suggestions by changing their preferences, globally or just for that story.

3. Design for time-appropriate reading, and for use and reuse. Can we design a better way to earmark content than the current, simplistic URL bookmarking? What are better ways to support different temporalities of information and different consumption paces? Can we design ways for slow-burn stories to linger, while fast-burn stories are updated with new content?

Indeed, some stories develop over long stretches of time, while others move at a very fast pace. Here is a frustrating experience: Subscribe to a few news feeds and go away for a few days. Revisiting the content in a feed reader presents this challenge: Where to start reading? Beginning with the old content may be reasonable so nothing is overlooked, but a breaking news item may have completely resolved with the most current article.

Given a story, particularly one with an ending, smart ways are needed to visualize the story’s unfolding. Step-by-step timeline views are useful here. So are smart, automated summaries.

There are lots of opportunities for useful changes here.