Dadblog

This is the second in a series of posts looking at how the mainstream news media handle “slow news.” To see what I mean by slow news, take a look at the original post, and to see how the BBC handles things, take a look at the first in the series.

To see how news media is slowing down news (if at all), I’ve taken a reference topic: British identity cards. I’ve also adopted two reference sites which provide information on this issue: the No2ID site, which is a blog-based site for the campaign group which is against the adoption of identity cards; and the Wikipedia page for identity cards. My proposition is that both of these sites are frequently updated, provide a huge amount of context, and essentially grow in value over time because of the way they are curated and edited. The BBC failed to match either site with its offering; now I’m going to look at the Telegraph, in the same way I looked at the Beeb.

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I got a fair amount of questions and feedback on my Slow News post of a few weeks ago, and I wanted to develop it further.

My essential proposition is this: that news media is still focussed on the day-to-day “the river of news” rather than contextualising issues and providing information for decoding important stuff. The analogy I used in the original post was that of an object in a darkened room. Currently, most news media seek to reveal that object by shining individual beams of very bright light, in the form of news stories which are catalysed by external events, for instance a politician’s speech or an election cycle. Wouldn’t it be better if there was a way to turn the room’s ceiling light on and reveal the issue in as multi-faceted a way as possible?

I called the attempt to do this, through explanation of context and curating over time, “slow news”. I argued that Wikipedia does it best because it places a topic at a URL and adds detail and context around that subject over time, rather than placing each individual item of new information about a subject on a new URL (as a news organisation does with stories).

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I thought the new Addictomatic might be one answer to my request for slower news, but it doesn’t work for me because it organises content by its source. It really doesn’t matter to me that a story comes from ask.com or Technorati, so why arrange it like that? Why not arrange all that stuff by, say, format, or date, or relevance?

If we can have slow food, why can’t we have slow news? Why does everything around news have to be fast?

The “slow food” movement treats food as something to be cherished, something to spend time with. Our appreciation and understanding of what food is increases with the time we spend with it. “Slows news” would see us organising our news sites in a way to allow attention to be given to a news story over time, rather than just at the instant at which it is producing the brightest light. To some extent, the rise of the blogosphere has already given us this facility, but it’s diffuse and depends on additional tools and services - RSS readers, Google alerts, Twitter, whatever - to give an individual access to it. So why don’t newspaper sites provide for slow news?

Take, for instance, the front page of the Telegraph. No particular reason to pick on the Telegraph, I just plucked it from the air. As I write this, the following stories are being covered in one way or another:

• Global warming
• A father killing himself over a school place
• The Austrian cellar nightmare
• Gordon Brown and the 42-day internment plan
• Boris Johnson “wooing” the LibDems
• Ian McKellen returning as Gandalf
• Chelsea v. Liverpool
• Manchester United v. Barcelona
• Shoaib’s failed appeal
• House prices sliding again
• Calls for a “supermarket Tsar”
• BSkyB’s “secret weapon”
• Toll roads - Britain needs more of them
• Gordon Brown and the 10p tax rate fiasco
• The price of progress in Beijing
• A tasy recipe to get to your table in 10 minutes

And that’s just the stuff above the fold. Now, many of these represent a “story space” in which events will unfold. Some of these “story spaces” might even make sense as a navigational entity, say a “topic” page. Off the top of my head I’d say we’ve got the following “story spaces” represented in here:

• Global warming
• School admissions and the stress they cause
• The Austrian cellar nightmare
• 42-day internment
• The London Mayoral election
• The remaking of the Hobbit
• Chelsea v. Liverpool
• Manchester Utd. v Barcelona
• The Champions League
• Shoaib’s cricket ban
• House prices
• Supermarket regulation
• BSkyB
• Digital TV competition in Britain
• Tax in Britain
• Poverty in Britain
• Gordon Brown
• China
• Recipes

See the problem? From an IA perspective these are all over the place. Global warming, house prices and 42-day internment are all obvious topic pages. But what “level” should the Shoaib cricket ban on? And what’s the best way to organise all the coverage around an individual football match? From a human perspective, these story spaces make perfect sense. I’d love the Telegraph to provide me a single destination on, for instance, supermarket regulation. And I’d love that page to include a bit more than just the most recent stories that fall into that area. I’d love it to include some analysis, some data, some stuff from the web. I’d love it to be “slow.” Which causes another problem. Who does that editing? And how is the page maintained and updated?

Some sites, notably the NY Times, are using “topics” to provide a kind of slow news experience. But for me these topic pages are simply dressed up archives. They do of course provide a valuable service, both to the user and to the site publisher in the form of SEO. But they’re not necessarily all that pleasing as media experiences.

I think this “slow news” idea is one reason why Wikipedia’s coverage of news events is often so attractive. Firstly, Wikipedia provides a single and persistent URL around a story (which newspapers sites often, notably, do not do). Then that page starts to develop and grow. Information starts to attach itself to the URL. The page’s informational value increases at least partly because it’s a single page. And, of course, because of the nature of Wikipedia the “maintenance” question comes pre-answered.

Where’s the newspaper equivalent? I’m not sure I know. But I do think it’s worthy of consideration. At the moment, something happens and newspaper sites shine a bright, searing spotlight onto it. We get a tight, focussed dose of detail. And then the spotlight moves on to something else. If the original subject comes back into the news, we shine the spotlight onto it once more, and we often get the same detail or maybe a bit more. The problem is, to see the whole of a topic, we need some light shining on it all the time. A random series of superbright spotlights gives us a distorted picture of what we’re looking at.

So, slow news and consistent light. Maybe I should tag a few IA types to give some thoughts on this?