Newspaper story, online, has new life cycles, many questions

Posted by on Monday, November 21, 2011 · Leave a Comment 

“Convoluted” is the key word in this graphic portrayal of the life of a news story today, thanks to our new post-blog, mid-Twitter, online universe:

The New Convoluted Life Cycle of a Newspaper Story

Lauren Michell Rabaino of The Seattle Times raises fascinating issues in that illustrated article at MediaBistro’s “10,000 words” blog, opening with the observation that, “News must be really hard to follow for an everyday consumer of a newspaper website.”

As an online producer for the Seattle paper, as well as blogger at laurenmichell.com and an active Twitter user as @laurenmichell, she gives examples from the BBC and Los Angeles Times sites, as well as her own publication. She reports on a recent critique of “episodic” news reporting and throws the idea of more wiki-like publications into the mix, along with a discussion of how to implement updates in content management systems.

Rabaino’s item also suggests there is plenty of room for descriptive and comparative research by AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division members. After reading her piece, I just kept coming up with more questions…

Can academic research and experimentation help practitioners of “paper and online” journalism identify “best practices”? How much is editorial policy and how much is a function of the affordances and constraints of site content management systems?  How does newsflow vary among organizations of various sizes and missions, and how do their tools and procedures vary?

What approaches do we find at…

  • top-10 dailies with 24/7 websites
  • state capital dailies
  • medium-size city dailies
  • smaller local dailies
  • daily online, less-than-daily print publications
How many have adopted “digital first” approaches? Do individual reporters and editors use Twitter or Google+? Does an “official” Twitter account retweet or aggregate those posts, promote online editions, or offer additional services?  To what extent is a publication’s digital-first material staff-written and edited, or is it mostly a matter of inviting marginally edited “citizen journalists,” bloggers or publicist contributions?
Then there’s the question Rabaino raises at the beginning:
Do the readers know what’s going on with a particular story or publication?
For research purposes, how much of the process leaves a trail? Do versions and updates remain available to researchers, or do the tweets, posts, feeds, pages, updates and replates disappear into the bitstream of this new digitital news lifecycle?  A more wiki-like approach, with “history” and “discussion” pages embedded in each story, certainly would make that process interesting.
From my bookmark archives, see this fascinating use of a wiki’s history pages, and of online tools to report research results,  in John Udell’s “screencast” narrated analysis of Wikipedia Heavy Metal Umlaut page back in 2005.

 

Filed under blogging, journalism, newsdiv, newsfuture, newspapers, online, research · Tagged with

About Bob Stepno
twitter.com/bobstep Radford University School of Communication faculty... UNC Ph.D. NandO.net Web news editor Wrote for... The Hartford Courant, Soundings, PC World

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