The power of extensive linking
In “Today’s papers” Slate summarizes the leading stories in the major newspapers of the United States. They use quite a lot of in-text linking and sometimes discusses the difference in perspectives among the newspapers. It’s an untraditional type of journalism, which gives a nice summary of a lot of information, but it could be vastly expanded to provide at much richer experience of news. Let’s look at it through our model.
Presentation
Today’s Papers is usually presented by a single person who reads the newspapers of the day. This person then summarizes the lead stories and links to the articles in question. The links are placed inside the text itself, and the whole reading experience is therefore rather smooth. You don’t have to check out the sources to get a quick overview.
In terms of comprehension the writer of the day seldom helps the reader to understand the stories, the information is just summarized. Overall readers get a very good overview of the important news of the day.
Context and perspectives
Today’s Papers doesn’t provide extra context. They only link to lead stories. In the case that the newspapers leads with similar stories, the journalist holds the articles up against each other and point out differences in terms of content and perspectives on the subject. The service itself doesn’t grasp the vast complexity of our world, but the approach is very interesting and seems useful.
Tools to create meaning and take action
The only build-in tool of Today’s Papers for meaning creation is a comment function in it’s most simple form. The journalist is ‘voiceless’ and gives the impression of objectively summarizing the content, so there’s no action involving element.
Conclusion
Today’s Papers gives the reader a good and quick summary of what the major U.S. newspapers consider the most important new information of the day. The perspectives are limited by their select source list, and they (usually) only focus on the lead stories of the day.
What can we learn?
Slate could take their daily overview far beyond the current model and link to many other sources than the major U.S. newspapers. In this way they could include massive amounts of perspectives within the artifact it self. They could also relatively easy link to extra context, and the journalist could point out interesting connections and implications of the information to enhance the reader’s comprehension and understanding.
Imagine a web site with an editorial staff that does nothing but summarize 100’s of sources and then writes up hyperlinked artifacts that provides all the different - and sometimes conflicting - information, connects different perspectives and links to extensive context and background information.
Good examples where this approach is already somewhat used is in the best of Wikipedia’s articles.
This reminds me of the old “Journalists! Start linking to your sources”-debate. But I’m talking about taking it much further than that and including massive amounts of links to context and opinion also. Maybe we can call it meta-journalism or contextlism. I imagine a service that helps me read up on all the sources and presents it to me in a much better way than traditional journalism does.
It’s the beauty of this model that I can read the text without checking the sources and get a quick overview, but I can also choose to explore all the context as much as I want.
A service like this would be my first choice of reading in the morning. In a sense this is what bloggers already do, but it’s too sporadic and unorganized to be really effective. If it was done systematically in a structured editorial environment that attempted to cover the vast complexity of our world, I believe it would be a very powerful tool.
