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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

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...

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...