6 ms·

The future of news is not an article

146 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

godzillabrennus 11y ago
My takeaway from this article is amazement. Amazement that the New York Times is trying something new. I applaud them for that. The Tribune Company is about to sell its Michigan Ave building since its bleeding cash. They established a venture fund a few years ago but last I heard hadn't invested yet since they hadn't found anything worth an investment. In an industry full of failing companies it's delightful to see one Titan try to stay relevant.
- liamzebedee 11y ago
  Definitely. I agree completely. For someone relatively uninformed on the scene, the NYT certainly seem like a leader in the news industry for going forward with new digital media [1]. I really like the idea of Particles. I had a similar thought this past year about building a news MVP that simply consisted of atomic facts (no more than a sentence) with an attached probability and discussion. Kind of like those you see in the IPCC (international panel on climate change) reports, where they have their claim and degree of certainty. We were getting there with the whole Wikidata initiative, but it's still in its primitive stages with respect to content being statically authored and updated (AFAIK). It would be very interesting to see where we go with GraphQL - I could see that becoming the dominant machine-to-machine protocol for Semantic Web 3.0. The whole idea of taking what are usually REST resources and turning them into hierarchical JSON documents which you can query very flexibly is immediately appealing. If this Particle concept catches on like cards have in UI design, I'd expect Twitter to be the first to ride the wave. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i...
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's co-founder, already tried to make a site using atomic facts. It was called Infobitt, and lasted about a year or so before he closed it down a few months ago. The problem with using the fact as the smallest data unit is that it invites fact checking, which slows down the news reporting. Ironically, if sanger had actually used his system to create Wikipedia pages, it would probably have had more success. Wikidata is not going to work. It suffers from the same issue, as well as having problems relying on Wikipedia's "facts". As for Twitter, I doubt they can do it either. Their "Moments" initiative shows how little they understand curation.
    - skybrian 11y ago
      Vox is doing a pretty good job of it. The NYT already has quite a large number of topic pages on a variety of subjects [1], [2]. It's not Wikipedia, but it's not a small number of articles either. [1] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i... [2] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/artificial_intelligence/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...
      - sparkzilla 11y ago
        I checked one of the feeds [1]. It's just a list of existing articles, by NYT writers, that don't have meta data. That's not what the NYT article is about. To make the meta tagging work you have to also strip down the article into each individual news event. For example, imagine a list of NYT articles about Yoko Ono. Almost every article about her will mention that she was married to John Lennon, and that he died in 1980. In an article you have to repeat this information because you assume that the physical paper was thrown out each day. But in a news database these events would be separate data events, and would not be repeated. Vox is the same - they still use articles, not data in their place. [1]http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/tim_golden/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g...
    - volaski 11y ago
      There is actually a job title called "Fact checker" at newspapers. That's why people tend to trust high end newspapers like NYT over some random blog that just posts whatever they hear asap to get traffic. I doubt NYT plans on opening up their particles to any randos on the web. They already have great in house employees who can do this job very well.
    - austenallred 11y ago
      Infobitt is still technically live, but it is so riddled with problems I don't know where to start.
    - fpvracing 11y ago
- free2rhyme214 11y ago
  Amazed they're trying to save their business?
  - cenal 11y ago
    Look at the guy that Sam Zell put in charge of the Tribune while trying to turn it around: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/business/media/23tribune.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/business/media/23tribune.h...
sdkmvx 11y ago
> Can you imagine if, every time something new happened in Syria, Wikipedia published a new Syria page, and in order to understand the bigger picture, you had to manually sift through hundreds of pages with overlapping information? That is exactly what Wikipedia does. It works well because most readers are not looking in an encyclopedia for information on yesterday's events. Likewise inverted pyramid works well because it simultaneously satisfies the needs of new readers who need the most important details at the top and repeat readers who can quickly scan the short paragraphs for new information. I despise new-style live streaming because it is so awkward to read; I have to read backwards, bottom-to-top, and the most important details are often in the middle.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  One of the major problem with Wikipedia is that it acts like a book on the web, rather than a database. It is impossible to search the content of articles and meta data on the actual content is practically non-existent. This means you can't sort or filter the pages. The live-streams you have read so far are very messy -- as they should be due to the nature of breaking news -- but there are other hybrids that fit between Wikipedia and news that can work well for most readers.
Jgrubb 11y ago
I'm the lead dev at a company that ten years ago was a B2B publishing company. We published trade magazines for a variety of technical and R&D type fields. We're now in online publishing (obviously) and just finished tagging several hundred thousand pieces of content with metadata that we'd used a 3rd party service to extract. We'd reached the exact same conclusions about the process of organizing and categorizing our ginormous back catalog of content, and having humans perform the tasks of summarization and categorization just "doesn't scale" temporally. Interesting topics come and go, editors come and go. Anyway, I'm really proud that we already have (in production) a system for tagging our content in this exact same way and have already built a v0 recommendation engine out of it.
ftwynn 11y ago
I think a lot of these ideas in here are awesome... but I don't see how they're different from the basic semantic web concepts that have been tossed around for years now.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Novelty man. People will always go after the new and shiny things, even if they're just redefinitions of old ideas. I've been spreading the merits of the semantic web for years. People just ignore it. I've never been able to tell whether the idea is flawed, or if people simply don't get it. I regularly go as far as to claim that the lack of semantic web is the cause of all the world's problems.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    The idea is flawed. Semantic Web expects people to do extra work, with no benefit. Create a benefit for those people, and you'll see it get done.
    - miguelrochefort 11y ago
      The benefit is the unifed interface. Imagine Facebook being replaced by the semantic web.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - marcosdumay 11y ago
        For the people creating content, that's a problem, not a benefit. Yes, for the readers, if there were enough structured content available, that would be a benefit. They aren't the ones that need convincing.
- volaski 11y ago
  I think the difference is that the times potentially has the ability to execute. Semantic web was a cool idea but failed to catch on even with all the grassroots efforts. NYT already has tons of content with tons of metadata and they have the readership. Maybe they can pull it off.
sparkzilla 11y ago
We have been breaking the traditional news article apart at Newslines for over a year now. The result is a hybrid between daily news, Wikipedia and Google Search. We break each news story down into a 150-word summary unit based on each news event which we then sort by date to make a timeline of the news. For example, Tom Hanks[1]. Because the news summary is treated like data, we can sort it to show different views of the data. for example, reversing the sort gives a "biography view" [2]. Compare this to a Wikipedia page, or even a newspaper article, which, because they text-based, cannot be sorted. By adding meta data we an then filter the data. For example, we use "Event Types" such as births, deaths, arrests, and many more to let the users take control over what they want to see. For example you can see all the apologies on the site.[3] A big advantage of this way of creating pages is that it results in far less bias than in a traditional news article. If you're interested in more, I wrote a follow up to the NYT article [4]. [1] http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/ http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/ [2] http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/?order=ASC http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/?order=ASC [3] http://newslines.org/event/life/apology/ http://newslines.org/event/life/apology/ [4] http://newslines.org/blog/the-article-is-dead-long-live-the-feed/ http://newslines.org/blog/the-article-is-dead-long-live-the-...
miguelrochefort 11y ago
There is no reason for new information to be more important than old information. Sure, there's a subset of information that's ephemeral and must expire at some point. The kind of information with a call to action. But that shouldn't be the whole picture. We need a new kind of information engines that both knows what you know, and knows what you want to know. Something that both teach you old and timeless facts, and keeps you up to date with new discoveries. New shiny stories shouldn't distract me from what I planned to read yesterday. We need a cure to novelty. I like this New York Times initiative.
- frenchy 11y ago
  > There is no reason for new information to be more important than old information. New information is often more entertaining than old information, particularly if the old information is already known to the reader. For better or for worse, I think news is often used for entertainment.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zmitri 11y ago
The future of news is not an article, nor video, nor particles, nor arbitraging the cost of a page view from advertisers vs the cost of paid distribution on Facebook (yes NYT does this) — it is finding a business model that actually works and that people want to pay for. Let's go over some of the points brought up with that in mind: Would you as a reader pay for more for a service that had "enhanced tools for journalists"? No. Would you as a reader pay more for "summarization and synthesis"? Probably not, Wikipedia and Google already do this really well. Would you as a reader pay more for "adaptive content"? No. Newspapers (including the New York Times) are in serious trouble, and instead of playing catch up to look like a mix of every tech service, they should focus on delivering an experience that people actual want to pay for. There is no future of news without figuring out the next model for news.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Your understanding of business models is flawed. Over is the time where people would pay for content. The new model is for service providers to provide content whose call to action is in their best interest.
  - zmitri 11y ago
    Paying for an "experience" vs "content" are very different things. I definitely don't think people will pay for content, and was not trying to saying they would above. Perhaps my understanding of business models is flawed, but this year my company will pay out millions dollars to journalists. In that regard perhaps my flawed understanding is an asset!
- volaski 11y ago
  First of all, NYT has over million paid online subscribers. It's not like NOBODY wants to pay for NYT. Second, I think it's short sighted to say "They should build something people would want to pay for". It's like going back in time when Facebook was just getting started, or Google was getting started, and telling them "You should build a product that users will pay for". Here's what I think: "enhanced tools for journalists", "summarization and synthesis", "adaptive content", all of them will contribute to create value. When there's more value, there will be many ways to translate that into revenue. The reason newspapers are in danger is NOT because they are not monetizing enough. It's because they are not providing as significant value as they used to in their good old days.
mjklin 11y ago
Funny, I just read this in the book The Logic of Failure by Dorner: > The information a newspaper-reading citizen receives about economic developments or the spread of epidemics, for example, lacks both continuity and constant correctives. Information comes in isolated fragments. We can assume that those conditions make it considerably more difficult to develop an adequate picture of developments over time. Maybe this is the answer?
fimbaz 11y ago
Am I the only one who read the headline like: "People should stop writing articles about the future of news, it's not a thing."
Alex3917 11y ago
I created a (non-technical) prototype of basically this exact idea a few years ago to get a better understanding of the economics. It's online if anyone wants to play with it: http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html Basically the economics are insanely good if you're using this as an open source tool to create NYT-style articles, less so if you're Circa. The people comparing this to the semantic web don't understand Zipf's Law, and just how slowly things actually change. E.g. we only get new data on adult literacy every 10 years. And the last data we have on antibiotic resistance for some bacteria/drugs is from the early 90s, and that's more the rule than the exception. Pretty much every single article about the U.S. is using the same set of a couple thousand facts, and most of those only get updated every ten years or so. There are a few exceptions like with federal arrest data that gets updated yearly, but that's pretty rare. Basically if you're trying to do this using machine learning or any sort of algorithms, you're completely wasting your time and going down the wrong path. This is way easier to implement well than you think. (But again, not necessarily super profitable unless you own the NYT.)
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  I ran a wiki-based fact check for a while. This looks like it could be the start of something like that. However, a big problem is that the attempt to find truth is over-rated as a driver for the news market. Most people really don't care, and by the time the few that do care have found "the truth" the news cycle has passed.
  - jigneshg 11y ago
    I do agree with you, the biggest concern for the users will be reliability of the news and sources. Rumors are widespread sometime.
- itsybitsycoder 11y ago
  I can tell you're not focused on styling of it (fair enough) but it might be good to slap a basic CSS reset on it or something. In my browser (Chrome) it's very hard to read, mostly because there are paragraph breaks in the bullet points but no spaces between different points, so you get weird groupings of text: http://imgur.com/ShVjXXu http://imgur.com/ShVjXXu
KasianFranks 11y ago
Auto Summarized Content (Algorithm: Tuatara GS1) In order to leverage the knowledge that is inside every article published, we need to first encode it in a way that makes it searchable and extractable...While news organizations have adapted to new media through the creative use of interactivity, video, and audio, even the most innovative formats are still conceived of as dispatches: items that get published once and don 't evolve or accumulate knowledge over time... Auto Extracted Ranked Tags (Algorithm: Tuatara GS1) article, future, apple, media, published, reporting, facebook, print, knowledge, constraint, publisher, shape, app, discussion, rethink, assumption, accumulate, propose, story, reading, website, rhythm, focu, piece, day, specially, publish, searchable, possibility, accumulative, conceive http://52.11.1.7/TuataraSum http://52.11.1.7/TuataraSum
vlehto 11y ago
>3. Adaptive content The only reason I don't order morning paper these days is that it's physically so big. I only read about 5% of it. If I forget about it, it's going to explode my mailbox. And I would have to take the papers to garbage twice a week to fend off chaos. Could I please subscribe only to politics, science, actual news and opinions. Curated by local major news outlet. It would be the best possible way to kill the time needed to drink two cups of coffee. I think people are overthinking this. By "what would average person want?". Maybe they want what you want?
esfandia 11y ago
Could this be done using Twitter? Each reporter/citizen who has an update on a news item would post a tweet with the info, and create a link back to the original news item(s) or the one(s) that needed updating. Hashtags would be used to categorize the news item. You get an annotated DAG. User can then filter based on the reporter they want to follow on that news item, the hashtag that is interesting to them, or on the timeline of the news item they're following.
KasianFranks 11y ago
Auto summarized Medium.com: http://52.11.1.7/TuataraSum/medium/medium_summary_enabled.html http://52.11.1.7/TuataraSum/medium/medium_summary_enabled.ht...
li-ch 11y ago
Not only news. Articles' future is not articles.
vonnik 11y ago
Former NYT journalist here. I'm really glad the paper is experimenting like this. I want to make a slightly bolder statement than the headline of the post: The future of news is not written, and it's not one way. It's conversational and spoken. We've been migrating away from the printed word at least since the advent of radio, and TV only accelerated that trend. What people want is the interaction and surprise and meaning created in a conversation. Papers like the NYT aspire to "drive the conversation." But they are not engaged in "the conversation" on an individual level. They are largely confined to the one-to-many schema of the old news flow, where publications speak and readers listen. The future of news, imho, is chatbots personalized to the user, that bring up the daily news like small talk on a long commute, based on the AI's knowledge of the news consumer. And it'll have through a voice UX just as much as through print.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Thanks for the interesting perspective. While I can see myself enjoying chatterbots telling me news in a casual way, I still wonder - with such focus on "surprise and meaning", where do facts enter the picture? Are we migrating away from factual information towards personalized, opinionated content?
  - vonnik 11y ago
    I think we already migrated. Right now, each story is a bundle of facts and statements. A chatbot could disaggregrate those facts, and feed the news consumer answers to questions they have about the subject without imposing such a total order to the presentation of those facts. That would be the give and take, and the conversation could range far beyond a single piece of news. It's all about contextualizing events. Reporters and editors make a lot of decisions about the context they present, but in this new choose-your-own-adventure format, readers could explore context beyond the limits imposed by a small newshole and all the decisions that entails.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I wonder how this will change the way news and society interact. Right now, news serve as a very important social object - recent events and popular articles provide default topics for conversation for people. If we move to "choose-your-own-adventure format", we may lose the ability to discuss it, as everyone will have their own version of "recent events". BTW. the way you described it - choose-your-own-adventure, seamlessly explorable news - sounds really cool. I'd definitely love to try something like this out.
contentwrangler 11y ago
This thread illustrates the need for personalized services, aimed at individuals who will pay for what they want. I mean, we have lived through the 'here's a package of content our psychic powers indicate you will want to buy' (newspapers, record albums, cable TV packages). What people want differs, which is why we need intelligent content. The capabilities (that's what upper management cares about) add value to the organization adopting the new approach and makes them capable (capacity + ability) to deliver better, more people-focused (instead of persona-focused) content. Agility is key. The world of big content will change everything as we begin to ask questions of content and deliver adaptive content focused on individual needs. My two cents. My crystal ball is cracked, but seems to have been working fine lately. ;) Scott Abel TheContentWrangler

146 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

My takeaway from this article is amazement. Amazement that the New York Times is trying something new. I applaud them for that. The Tribune Company is about to sell its Michigan Ave building since its bleeding cash. They established a venture fund a few years ago but last I heard hadn't invested yet since they hadn't found anything worth an investment. In an industry full of failing companies it's delightful to see one Titan try to stay relevant.

liamzebedee 11y ago
Definitely. I agree completely. For someone relatively uninformed on the scene, the NYT certainly seem like a leader in the news industry for going forward with new digital media [1]. I really like the idea of Particles. I had a similar thought this past year about building a news MVP that simply consisted of atomic facts (no more than a sentence) with an attached probability and discussion. Kind of like those you see in the IPCC (international panel on climate change) reports, where they have their claim and degree of certainty. We were getting there with the whole Wikidata initiative, but it's still in its primitive stages with respect to content being statically authored and updated (AFAIK). It would be very interesting to see where we go with GraphQL - I could see that becoming the dominant machine-to-machine protocol for Semantic Web 3.0. The whole idea of taking what are usually REST resources and turning them into hierarchical JSON documents which you can query very flexibly is immediately appealing. If this Particle concept catches on like cards have in UI design, I'd expect Twitter to be the first to ride the wave. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i...
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's co-founder, already tried to make a site using atomic facts. It was called Infobitt, and lasted about a year or so before he closed it down a few months ago. The problem with using the fact as the smallest data unit is that it invites fact checking, which slows down the news reporting. Ironically, if sanger had actually used his system to create Wikipedia pages, it would probably have had more success. Wikidata is not going to work. It suffers from the same issue, as well as having problems relying on Wikipedia's "facts". As for Twitter, I doubt they can do it either. Their "Moments" initiative shows how little they understand curation.
  - skybrian 11y ago
    Vox is doing a pretty good job of it. The NYT already has quite a large number of topic pages on a variety of subjects [1], [2]. It's not Wikipedia, but it's not a small number of articles either. [1] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i... [2] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/artificial_intelligence/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...
    - sparkzilla 11y ago
      I checked one of the feeds [1]. It's just a list of existing articles, by NYT writers, that don't have meta data. That's not what the NYT article is about. To make the meta tagging work you have to also strip down the article into each individual news event. For example, imagine a list of NYT articles about Yoko Ono. Almost every article about her will mention that she was married to John Lennon, and that he died in 1980. In an article you have to repeat this information because you assume that the physical paper was thrown out each day. But in a news database these events would be separate data events, and would not be repeated. Vox is the same - they still use articles, not data in their place. [1]http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/tim_golden/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g...
  - volaski 11y ago
    There is actually a job title called "Fact checker" at newspapers. That's why people tend to trust high end newspapers like NYT over some random blog that just posts whatever they hear asap to get traffic. I doubt NYT plans on opening up their particles to any randos on the web. They already have great in house employees who can do this job very well.
  - austenallred 11y ago
    Infobitt is still technically live, but it is so riddled with problems I don't know where to start.
  - fpvracing 11y ago
free2rhyme214 11y ago
Amazed they're trying to save their business?
- cenal 11y ago
  Look at the guy that Sam Zell put in charge of the Tribune while trying to turn it around: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/business/media/23tribune.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/business/media/23tribune.h...

sdkmvx 11y ago

> Can you imagine if, every time something new happened in Syria, Wikipedia published a new Syria page, and in order to understand the bigger picture, you had to manually sift through hundreds of pages with overlapping information? That is exactly what Wikipedia does. It works well because most readers are not looking in an encyclopedia for information on yesterday's events. Likewise inverted pyramid works well because it simultaneously satisfies the needs of new readers who need the most important details at the top and repeat readers who can quickly scan the short paragraphs for new information. I despise new-style live streaming because it is so awkward to read; I have to read backwards, bottom-to-top, and the most important details are often in the middle.

sparkzilla 11y ago
One of the major problem with Wikipedia is that it acts like a book on the web, rather than a database. It is impossible to search the content of articles and meta data on the actual content is practically non-existent. This means you can't sort or filter the pages. The live-streams you have read so far are very messy -- as they should be due to the nature of breaking news -- but there are other hybrids that fit between Wikipedia and news that can work well for most readers.

Jgrubb 11y ago

I'm the lead dev at a company that ten years ago was a B2B publishing company. We published trade magazines for a variety of technical and R&D type fields. We're now in online publishing (obviously) and just finished tagging several hundred thousand pieces of content with metadata that we'd used a 3rd party service to extract. We'd reached the exact same conclusions about the process of organizing and categorizing our ginormous back catalog of content, and having humans perform the tasks of summarization and categorization just "doesn't scale" temporally. Interesting topics come and go, editors come and go. Anyway, I'm really proud that we already have (in production) a system for tagging our content in this exact same way and have already built a v0 recommendation engine out of it.

ftwynn 11y ago

I think a lot of these ideas in here are awesome... but I don't see how they're different from the basic semantic web concepts that have been tossed around for years now.

miguelrochefort 11y ago
Novelty man. People will always go after the new and shiny things, even if they're just redefinitions of old ideas. I've been spreading the merits of the semantic web for years. People just ignore it. I've never been able to tell whether the idea is flawed, or if people simply don't get it. I regularly go as far as to claim that the lack of semantic web is the cause of all the world's problems.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  The idea is flawed. Semantic Web expects people to do extra work, with no benefit. Create a benefit for those people, and you'll see it get done.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    The benefit is the unifed interface. Imagine Facebook being replaced by the semantic web.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      For the people creating content, that's a problem, not a benefit. Yes, for the readers, if there were enough structured content available, that would be a benefit. They aren't the ones that need convincing.
volaski 11y ago
I think the difference is that the times potentially has the ability to execute. Semantic web was a cool idea but failed to catch on even with all the grassroots efforts. NYT already has tons of content with tons of metadata and they have the readership. Maybe they can pull it off.

sparkzilla 11y ago

We have been breaking the traditional news article apart at Newslines for over a year now. The result is a hybrid between daily news, Wikipedia and Google Search. We break each news story down into a 150-word summary unit based on each news event which we then sort by date to make a timeline of the news. For example, Tom Hanks[1]. Because the news summary is treated like data, we can sort it to show different views of the data. for example, reversing the sort gives a "biography view" [2]. Compare this to a Wikipedia page, or even a newspaper article, which, because they text-based, cannot be sorted. By adding meta data we an then filter the data. For example, we use "Event Types" such as births, deaths, arrests, and many more to let the users take control over what they want to see. For example you can see all the apologies on the site.[3] A big advantage of this way of creating pages is that it results in far less bias than in a traditional news article. If you're interested in more, I wrote a follow up to the NYT article [4]. [1] http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/ http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/ [2] http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/?order=ASC http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/?order=ASC [3] http://newslines.org/event/life/apology/ http://newslines.org/event/life/apology/ [4] http://newslines.org/blog/the-article-is-dead-long-live-the-feed/ http://newslines.org/blog/the-article-is-dead-long-live-the-...

miguelrochefort 11y ago

There is no reason for new information to be more important than old information. Sure, there's a subset of information that's ephemeral and must expire at some point. The kind of information with a call to action. But that shouldn't be the whole picture. We need a new kind of information engines that both knows what you know, and knows what you want to know. Something that both teach you old and timeless facts, and keeps you up to date with new discoveries. New shiny stories shouldn't distract me from what I planned to read yesterday. We need a cure to novelty. I like this New York Times initiative.

frenchy 11y ago
> There is no reason for new information to be more important than old information. New information is often more entertaining than old information, particularly if the old information is already known to the reader. For better or for worse, I think news is often used for entertainment.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

zmitri 11y ago

The future of news is not an article, nor video, nor particles, nor arbitraging the cost of a page view from advertisers vs the cost of paid distribution on Facebook (yes NYT does this) — it is finding a business model that actually works and that people want to pay for. Let's go over some of the points brought up with that in mind: Would you as a reader pay for more for a service that had "enhanced tools for journalists"? No. Would you as a reader pay more for "summarization and synthesis"? Probably not, Wikipedia and Google already do this really well. Would you as a reader pay more for "adaptive content"? No. Newspapers (including the New York Times) are in serious trouble, and instead of playing catch up to look like a mix of every tech service, they should focus on delivering an experience that people actual want to pay for. There is no future of news without figuring out the next model for news.

miguelrochefort 11y ago
Your understanding of business models is flawed. Over is the time where people would pay for content. The new model is for service providers to provide content whose call to action is in their best interest.
- zmitri 11y ago
  Paying for an "experience" vs "content" are very different things. I definitely don't think people will pay for content, and was not trying to saying they would above. Perhaps my understanding of business models is flawed, but this year my company will pay out millions dollars to journalists. In that regard perhaps my flawed understanding is an asset!
volaski 11y ago
First of all, NYT has over million paid online subscribers. It's not like NOBODY wants to pay for NYT. Second, I think it's short sighted to say "They should build something people would want to pay for". It's like going back in time when Facebook was just getting started, or Google was getting started, and telling them "You should build a product that users will pay for". Here's what I think: "enhanced tools for journalists", "summarization and synthesis", "adaptive content", all of them will contribute to create value. When there's more value, there will be many ways to translate that into revenue. The reason newspapers are in danger is NOT because they are not monetizing enough. It's because they are not providing as significant value as they used to in their good old days.

mjklin 11y ago

Funny, I just read this in the book The Logic of Failure by Dorner: > The information a newspaper-reading citizen receives about economic developments or the spread of epidemics, for example, lacks both continuity and constant correctives. Information comes in isolated fragments. We can assume that those conditions make it considerably more difficult to develop an adequate picture of developments over time. Maybe this is the answer?

fimbaz 11y ago

Am I the only one who read the headline like: "People should stop writing articles about the future of news, it's not a thing."

Alex3917 11y ago

I created a (non-technical) prototype of basically this exact idea a few years ago to get a better understanding of the economics. It's online if anyone wants to play with it: http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html Basically the economics are insanely good if you're using this as an open source tool to create NYT-style articles, less so if you're Circa. The people comparing this to the semantic web don't understand Zipf's Law, and just how slowly things actually change. E.g. we only get new data on adult literacy every 10 years. And the last data we have on antibiotic resistance for some bacteria/drugs is from the early 90s, and that's more the rule than the exception. Pretty much every single article about the U.S. is using the same set of a couple thousand facts, and most of those only get updated every ten years or so. There are a few exceptions like with federal arrest data that gets updated yearly, but that's pretty rare. Basically if you're trying to do this using machine learning or any sort of algorithms, you're completely wasting your time and going down the wrong path. This is way easier to implement well than you think. (But again, not necessarily super profitable unless you own the NYT.)

sparkzilla 11y ago
I ran a wiki-based fact check for a while. This looks like it could be the start of something like that. However, a big problem is that the attempt to find truth is over-rated as a driver for the news market. Most people really don't care, and by the time the few that do care have found "the truth" the news cycle has passed.
- jigneshg 11y ago
  I do agree with you, the biggest concern for the users will be reliability of the news and sources. Rumors are widespread sometime.
itsybitsycoder 11y ago
I can tell you're not focused on styling of it (fair enough) but it might be good to slap a basic CSS reset on it or something. In my browser (Chrome) it's very hard to read, mostly because there are paragraph breaks in the bullet points but no spaces between different points, so you get weird groupings of text: http://imgur.com/ShVjXXu http://imgur.com/ShVjXXu

KasianFranks 11y ago

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vlehto 11y ago

>3. Adaptive content The only reason I don't order morning paper these days is that it's physically so big. I only read about 5% of it. If I forget about it, it's going to explode my mailbox. And I would have to take the papers to garbage twice a week to fend off chaos. Could I please subscribe only to politics, science, actual news and opinions. Curated by local major news outlet. It would be the best possible way to kill the time needed to drink two cups of coffee. I think people are overthinking this. By "what would average person want?". Maybe they want what you want?

esfandia 11y ago

Could this be done using Twitter? Each reporter/citizen who has an update on a news item would post a tweet with the info, and create a link back to the original news item(s) or the one(s) that needed updating. Hashtags would be used to categorize the news item. You get an annotated DAG. User can then filter based on the reporter they want to follow on that news item, the hashtag that is interesting to them, or on the timeline of the news item they're following.

KasianFranks 11y ago

Auto summarized Medium.com: http://52.11.1.7/TuataraSum/medium/medium_summary_enabled.html http://52.11.1.7/TuataraSum/medium/medium_summary_enabled.ht...

li-ch 11y ago

Not only news. Articles' future is not articles.

vonnik 11y ago

Former NYT journalist here. I'm really glad the paper is experimenting like this. I want to make a slightly bolder statement than the headline of the post: The future of news is not written, and it's not one way. It's conversational and spoken. We've been migrating away from the printed word at least since the advent of radio, and TV only accelerated that trend. What people want is the interaction and surprise and meaning created in a conversation. Papers like the NYT aspire to "drive the conversation." But they are not engaged in "the conversation" on an individual level. They are largely confined to the one-to-many schema of the old news flow, where publications speak and readers listen. The future of news, imho, is chatbots personalized to the user, that bring up the daily news like small talk on a long commute, based on the AI's knowledge of the news consumer. And it'll have through a voice UX just as much as through print.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Thanks for the interesting perspective. While I can see myself enjoying chatterbots telling me news in a casual way, I still wonder - with such focus on "surprise and meaning", where do facts enter the picture? Are we migrating away from factual information towards personalized, opinionated content?
- vonnik 11y ago
  I think we already migrated. Right now, each story is a bundle of facts and statements. A chatbot could disaggregrate those facts, and feed the news consumer answers to questions they have about the subject without imposing such a total order to the presentation of those facts. That would be the give and take, and the conversation could range far beyond a single piece of news. It's all about contextualizing events. Reporters and editors make a lot of decisions about the context they present, but in this new choose-your-own-adventure format, readers could explore context beyond the limits imposed by a small newshole and all the decisions that entails.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I wonder how this will change the way news and society interact. Right now, news serve as a very important social object - recent events and popular articles provide default topics for conversation for people. If we move to "choose-your-own-adventure format", we may lose the ability to discuss it, as everyone will have their own version of "recent events". BTW. the way you described it - choose-your-own-adventure, seamlessly explorable news - sounds really cool. I'd definitely love to try something like this out.

contentwrangler 11y ago

This thread illustrates the need for personalized services, aimed at individuals who will pay for what they want. I mean, we have lived through the 'here's a package of content our psychic powers indicate you will want to buy' (newspapers, record albums, cable TV packages). What people want differs, which is why we need intelligent content. The capabilities (that's what upper management cares about) add value to the organization adopting the new approach and makes them capable (capacity + ability) to deliver better, more people-focused (instead of persona-focused) content. Agility is key. The world of big content will change everything as we begin to ask questions of content and deliver adaptive content focused on individual needs. My two cents. My crystal ball is cracked, but seems to have been working fine lately. ;) Scott Abel TheContentWrangler