The Copenhagen Project

So, we are basically building a catalogue of all the small tools and concepts we have found during our research.

Now it’s time to one of my favorite ways to get a good overview of the most important events around the globe: The Economist’s ‘Politics this week‘ and ‘Business this week‘. It’s lacking a lot of functionality, but combined with other tools it could be a interesting concept to create new formats upon.

Presentation

What the editor of The World This Week (as the two pages is called in the print magazine) do is basically to summarize the most important events and issues from the last week, dedicating one paragraph to each focus. The result in the print edition is two full pages of the last week’s most important global political and business related news.

Here is an example of a paragraph:

“International inspectors confirmed that North Korea’s plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, and four other facilities there have been shut off. A first instalment of fuel oil promised to North Korea in return for ending its nuclear programme arrived, and six-country talks resumed in Beijing.” (It’s from here).

If The Economist is running an article on the given subject there’s also a link to that article immediately after the paragraph in the online edition.

It’s interesting how the ‘resolution’, i.e. how many separate news paragraphs that are present, is determined by the size of the physical magazine, not whether a specific week has many or few relevant events to focus on.

Context and perspectives

In the print edition: No context. Really - nothing. Not even a page reference to articles about the event in the magazine. In the online edition there’s a link, but as stated above only to one article and only if the magazine has one about it.

In terms of comprehension one can argue that the whole concept helps the reader to get a very good overview of what is important and what isn’t - according to the editor’s view, of course (or, a set of editorial values - which is a interesting thing about news judgment we probably will get back to later in the process).

A problem I see with traditional newspapers, is that the front page especially, but also the newspaper as a whole, serves as a function to rank the news of the day after importance. The problem is, that it only function in context to that specific day it’s published. One day the frontpage story may be a plane crash, the next day that the U.N. estimates 600.000 civilians deaths in Iraq because of the war.

There’s a big difference in the importance of these two pieces of information, and with traditional newspapers readers aren’t supported in their comprehension of that. ‘The World This Week’ provides - to some extend - this useful service.

Tools to create meaning and take action

Aren’t present. As events are only summarized with no detail, there’s no help in understanding why the information is important and relevant, and there’s nothing that encourages action on part of the reader.

Conclusion

The World This Week gives the reader a quick overview of the main events of the past week. It’s fragmented, and there’s very little guidance to explore the information further. It’s strongest forte in it’s current form is helping the reader to understand the importance of different event’s from the past week in relation to each other.

There’s very few tools out there that help people to perceive the importance of information, and it’s seldom openly discussed upon which values and principles the prioritization of information is based.

The World This Week could be much improved if it was combined with other tools and methods of information presentation, e.g. the concepts from my post The power of extensive linking, but also the other functions we’re gonna examine during this project. This is partly what we’re trying to do here; look at interesting services and tools and finding new ways to combine them into concepts that can serve as effective new ways of staying up to date in the future.

Note: If any one knows similar services, they are very welcome to post a link in the comments.