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The content cascade: How content will flow in digital news en...

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Saved by 5 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-04-07


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Rather than trying to redefine “the basic unit of news” — it used to be the story; is it now the fact, or the topic, the issue, or what? — and what that implies for the work of journalists, going forward it will be most useful to think about content as a cascade, as in a stream running down a rocky glen, always moving, dividing, uniting, filling pools here and there, constantly finding new niches to fill.

Highlighted by hrheingold

The content cascade starts with raw information. It can be anything: reporter-gathered data, citizen journo input, crowd-sourced information, audio, video, press releases, government data and reports, industry data.

In a traditional newsroom, this stuff comes in, serves as story fodder, or not, gets piled up under and around the desks of reporters, and stays there — static — until the next general purge.

But in a digital newsroom, it can be digitally archived and organized, and much of it can be made available online to readers interested in digging into it. And of course, the digital newsroom further regards the entire Web as raw data and actively exploits that sourcing avenue.

At the next level in the content cascade model, significance is extracted from content — facts, background, comments and opinions are pulled into traditional “stories” as well as being analyzed, compared, questioned, evaluated, refuted, corrected, updated and otherwise spun and massaged. This happens in editorials, columns, blog posts, blog comments, Tweets, social network interactions, collaborative work by newsroom teams, and, not least of all, in actual conversations at the proverbial dinner tables, water coolers and bus stops, and even in old-fashioned letters to the editor.  There are no walls around this process — it crosses all boundaries including those between rival news enterprises.

Highlighted by hrheingold

All that massaging in blogs, comments, Tweets, social networks and conversations can now advance content into another stage, in which facts and opinions which have become generally accepted in the process are codified into wisdom — into generally accepted facts, into the fairly still, cool waters of collectively derived truth, into a collaboratively created, edited and augmented wiki.

Highlighted by hrheingold

Why should a reporter write a 20-inch story containing just one or two new facts embroidered with a rehash of background, quotes from interested parties and ancient history, when all that’s really needed is a brief report presenting the new information and referring readers to the wiki for the rest?

Highlighted by hrheingold

why should a reader, interested in deeper information about a subject in the news, have to search and sift through prior “stories” to figure out the background?

Highlighted by hrheingold

Why should a reporter have a quota measured in “stories,” whether it’s two courts-and-cops reports a day or one in-depth investigative masterpiece a week? In the cascade model of content management, every reporter follows a portfolio of issues, topics, trends, trials, personalities, businesses, governmental entities, towns, streets, buildings, non-profits — and a day’s work may consist of finishing a major investigative piece on one of these, while blogging about new developments touching on a handful of others, and adding new facts to the wiki entries for a bunch more. And the process of augmenting or correcting the wiki never really ends.

Highlighted by hrheingold

In the traditional model, whether in print or online, we only scan the latest “stories” to glean what’s of interest. But in a functional content cascade environment, we just watch the stream. We fish, if you’ll pardon the extended metaphor — today perhaps with a set of RSS feed specs, but soon, one hopes, with more sophisticated tools that can deliver to us what we really want and need on whatever device we want it.

Highlighted by hrheingold

What’s clear is that the flow of content, going forward, will no longer be linear, but convoluted. Facebook refers to its own content presentation as a “stream”; Twitter’s is clearly streamlike; but both are random and chaotic, as well, and both must be seen as elements of the raw material level of the content cascade — bits and pieces that will be rejoined downstream in blog and wiki formats.

Highlighted by hrheingold

In any event, finding and implementing the right software will not be nearly as difficult as moving people and organizations through the needed organizational and cultural changes.  The content cascade is not intuitive, nor is it automatic once begun; it must be actively taught, managed, encouraged, facilitated, conducted.

Highlighted by bertrandduperrin